Night Music

I never forgot 'The L-Shaped Room', what the British would call a kitchen sink film, a.k.a., social realism. It was hard for me to understand the love story in this 1962 drama...I was 15 or 16 years old...but I grasped much of the rest. How a middle-class woman had been brought down the social ladder by circumstance, forced to live in and adapt to impoverished London housing, and hold her head up. What does any of this have to do with me? Nothing, except that I am now in London living in my own L-shaped room. And like Leslie Caron's, it's a pressure cooker.

Why? It's hard to say, for I am really quite happy in this University of London dorm room. The place is small and claustrophobic. It could use a bar of soap, but other conditions are quite favorable. The wheelchair access seems battle hardened. I get the impression that someone in a wheelchair, a succession of someones, actually lived in this room. I can roll my wheelchair under the desk. There is an easy-to-reach crank that opens the windows. And, yes, there's a roll-in shower. As for the sense of being in a university, well, it's mixed. There are some definite students downstairs in the 9 AM cafeteria drinking tea and having the cooked English breakfast or the cold variety...guess which version I choose, complete with hot mustard on the bangers...but there are also people like me. Older people, here for the summer accommodation. The university isn't really happening. It is on idle.

The doors are hard to open, but no matter, for the doors to my wing and my room are in full view of the computer lounge. And all I have to do is linger for a troubled moment or two struggling with the stiff door spring and one or more students...post-graduate, American, Croatian, Indonesian...rush to help me get in. Unless one of the University of London employees gets there first. It takes about five seconds for something similar to happen when I roll into the cafeteria for my morning tea and, yes, £1 breakfast. One or more cafeteria workers rushes out from behind the steam table to load up my tray. As for the £1, that's actually a surcharge for the extra plates that somehow appear morning after morning as I wander past the cashier. Four breakfast items, the amount any reasonable person would eat, are included with the room. Somehow, I drive breakfast up into the six or seven item range.

What there isn't in the University of London dorms, aside from soap, is distraction. No television, not even a radio. There is also nothing that could be termed decor. Not a picture on the walls, even a calendar. This is a place to come back to at the end of the day -- and hope that you have had a day. A night here without a day to proceed it would be a bleak thing. I understand bleak. I remember my first room in London.

In 1969, an era when London rooms seemed maddeningly unavailable, somehow I had found one -- and promptly given the landlord a week's rent. That was before my cousins saw the place, a low-ceilinged basement with bare plaster columns and a concrete floor. Caroline and Bob shook their heads. No. There were limits. But it's a room, I protested. Someone would actually rent me this place, and I had been looking for weeks. Besides, I had already paid for the place. Caroline cleared her throat and speculated that this might just be the place in Islington where some lone guy had hung himself the week before. It certainly seemed possible, and I was so desperate that I didn't care. They did, and thus began several weeks living with their parents in Kensington. The rent was out the window, and so was I. I never saw it again, the L-shaped basement.

One of the prime differences between my current London dorm room and, say, my university dorm room of 40 years...and, yes, let's also compare the pathetic bedsit in 1969 Islington...is location. Wander out the door here...okay wander out several doors, winter proof design being what it is...and you stumble upon Bloomsbury at its most magnificent. Brunswick Square, a lush London garden of lawns and trees and flower beds beckons through a wrought iron fence. The Bloomsbury houses, the ones that aren't posh offices, present their shiny brass door knobs to passersby. The plane trees sigh. People wander the public squares, ogle the private ones and stop to take their pulses. With every beat the property values seem to increase.

It was Jake who brought me here on my arrival from Paddington Station. He helped me get unpacked, and we wandered outside to Brunswick Centre, the big concrete shopping arcade across from the square. The place was modern, anonymous, yet it was so booming with shoppers and diners and Londoners going to bars and cinemas...what the hell. Never mind the modern look of the place, the vibes were all London. Funny, I said to Jake, Marlou and I had lunch in an Italian place with the same name as this one. And then it dawned on me. We'd had lunch in the same restaurant...while staying at the supposedly wheelchair-friendly Holiday Inn at the other end of Brunswick Centre. Why hadn't I realized this? Because the place had come into its own. New shops, new shoppers, a place to be at night. The Tuscan bean soup was pretty good.

It's a half-hour run from Bloomsbury into the West End theaters. Uneven pavements, Soho streets packed with tourists and paved with cobblestones, all this delays my progress. Not that progress is really the important product here. After all, I'm going to see Trevor Nunn's 'A Little Night Music', hardly work, and leaving early enough to enjoy the vagaries of London en route would only add to the experience. But I am feeling anxious, even after an unusual research job on the Garrick Theatre's whereabouts. In fact, I've even used the Transport for London website to map out the pedestrian route.

However, it says something that I set out on my anxious journey without quite having the street address. At my wit's end, I stop a policeman in Leicester Square. Where is the Garrick? Emotionless, he asks me what play I want to see. He points me down the Charing Cross Road...and, there it is, the Sondheim marquee and my cousin Sandy waiting under it. Sandy has lost a wife to colon cancer. We don't mince words these days. At the interval, I ask him why I am so anxious...his grief experience has been different. He was raising a child, he explains. I speculate that everything seems much more shaky without someone deeply caring whether I make it or do not make it through Seven Dials, down Longacre and into the Garrick's wheelchair space in the dress circle. Sandy tells me he would miss me if I vanished en route. I thank him and explain that it's not the same...yet I'm not sure. Maybe caring is caring. And being family, Sandy's version has that special enduring force. As for the evening evening, it's a treasure...Nunn and his Royal National Theatre continuously resuscitating everything from Carousel to Night Music with deep affection and respect. Sandy walks me back to the L-shaped room. It seems small and a little bleak at night...modern, institutional and devoid of night music. But having had a theatre dose of the latter, I say goodnight to Sandy...and await further London developments.