Is This My West Side Story?

This morning, for whatever reason, I found myself singing one of the lyrics from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. I was in my kitchen, making breakfast, and just started singing it.

There's a place for us,
A time and place for us,
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us, somewhere...
 

By the summer of 1962, West Side Story had been the biggest thing on Broadway for months, had recently been made into a hit movie, and anyone who loved music--and had a romantic bone in their body--had a vinyl 33-1/3 LP of the soundtrack.

In late August of that year, we had loaded up the family car, a 3-year-old Ford 500, and my folks dropped me off for my first semester as a music major at SUNY Fredonia.

I think it was on that chaotic move-in day when I first heard Bud Pierce's passionate rendition of "Maria," which was also his name for the beautiful B-flat trumpet he'd brought with him to the mostly freshman residence in Gregory Hall.

Bud was a Long Island kid--there were many of them in the freshman class at Fred that year--and the version of Bernstein's "Maria" that he played was from trumpet god Maynard Ferguson's latest album.

Bud and Maria were still together when he played his senior recital four years later--unlike me and my unnamed Olds Studio trumpet which I'd left at home after changing my major at the end of my freshman year. In later years, I occasionally wondered if Bud had ever found his real-life Maria or had gone on to live his own West Side Story.

As I finished putting together my first meal of this fall day--in this west side town where I was supposed to live with my wife while she recovered from her illness--I wondered if there still might be, somewhere in the distance, a time and place for us.

You know, where peace and quiet and open air wait for us, somewhere...

LPK
Dreamwidth
8.29.2022