What's the Buzz?

What’s so good about ‘Good Friday’? It’s always puzzled me. If it’s the day that Jesus was crucified, why ‘good’? These days it’s ‘good’ because it’s the first real holiday of the year, and the trigger for everything to open up again for the new season. As someone said on the radio, ‘season of traffic jams and tailbacks’.

When I was young, it was quite a different day to now. All the shops were shut, and it tended to be a day for my mum to decide that, as I was at home, it was time to turn out the cupboard under the stairs. An epic task, as it was huge, full of toys, magazines, bits of material, and even an old tin bath! We had to haul everything out into the living room, which brought with it the hazard of me reading all the comics and magazines, before deciding if I could bear to throw them away. Mostly, I couldn’t.

My own personal tradition, which I guess started sometime after I saw the film for the first time, was to play the entire soundtrack of JCS as my concession to Easter. My mum insisted that you should go to church at least at Christmas and Easter, if at no other time, and, as I wouldn’t even go then, instead I would listen to JCS (often while cleaning out that flippin’ cupboard).

I guess the culmination of this was two years ago, when I didn’t just play the soundtrack, I actually went to see the show on Good Friday. Since that production closed in August 2005, I haven’t really been able to listen to the soundtrack, because the people on it aren’t ‘our’ boys, and the intonations are therefore ‘wrong’. I didn’t want to destroy the spell of memory. But this year, finally, I decided to play it again, and it was ok, but it made me sad to realise that I’m not hearing other voices in my head any more, they’ve faded. And so, for old times sake, and as a bit of personal indulgence, a picture. After all, I’ve been very restrained since starting this blog. There they all are, bar one cute little Aussie, it must have been a night he was off.