I had hoped to release my “Love Song for Cal Anderson” music video today, but (predictably, sigh) Production is citing delays. Something about “spring break.” Lame.
The video, which is sure to go viral, features adventurous friends and family members, along with other ideas I might not have considered since becoming a teacher (a good reminder that music is my real boss). It was primarily filmed in Carmel, CA where, twelve years ago this mother’s day, my husband and I got married. At the time I was four months pregnant, so I appreciate the additional lens offered each time the 11th happens to fall on mother’s day.
Regardless of delays, I would like to relay the significance of this date, May 7th, and the anniversary it contains, for posterity.
While researching J.M. Barrie, who wrote the play “Peter Pan” in novel form under the name “Peter and Wendy” (a theme in the upcoming video) I came across this remarkable fellow, an american theatre producer named Charles Frohman. Frohman leased the Duke of York’s theatre in London, where he premiered Barrie’s play “Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.” Today marks the 99th anniversary of Frohman’s untimely death at sea aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat on the day of it’s scheduled arrival in Liverpool.
Though some might think it odd to honor a person on the anniversary of their death, with respect, based on what I’ve read of him, I doubt Frohman would agree.
Last known photo of Charles Frohman Taken aboard the Lusitania, May 1915
The actress Rita Jovilet was also aboard the Lusitania and survived. She recalled that Frohman was working to tie life jackets to infants in moses baskets who had been sleeping in the ship’s nursery. He then lit a cigar and stood on the deck, “chatting with friends” while panicked passengers stampeded around him. Following the torpedo hit, a second internal explosion sent the Lusitania to the bottom in just 18 minutes. Before he was lost in what Jovilet called, “a great wave [that] swept along the deck,” Frohman paraphrased a line from Peter Pan: “Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure that life gives us.”
In his lifetime, Frohman produced over 700 shows. A memorial to him resides in Britain, at Marlow on Thames.
Peter and Wendy Published 1911
