Friend Zarathustra has come,
the guest of guests.
Now the world laughs,
the great curtain is rent.

The wedding day has come
for light and darkness…

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, “From High Mountains: Aftersong.”

I attended a second showing of Million Dollar Quartet, at the Stolop Island Theatre in Aurora. Why would I purchase a second ticket for something already experienced?

The play is the story of the coming together of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun Studios founded by Sam Phillips. The impromptu jam session took place on December 4, 1956. I was seven years old at the time. I had yet to discover Rock N’ Roll. The play celebrates an event that took place only once, just one time. It is a bitter-sweet tale, and the music “sets one’s hair on fire.” I think that is how it is when you are shaken by an intimate experience of something that makes you vibrate, want to laugh and cry at the same time, when “your name is called”, then there’s no doubt that this, “this” is as real as reality gets.

There was a lot of music in this play. The seven performers on the instruments were crazy-skilled, playing with elan and purpose as if they were channeling the souls of Presley, Cash, Perkins, and Lewis.

There was a Johnny Cash hit song, Ghost Riders In the Sky, which was included in the set list. It felt as if the tune were being played for the very first time. The sense of the melody, the interlaced harmonies combined light and darkness, thunder and lightning, what we call good and evil. I don’t know about others seated around me in the theater. But it seemed as if a “ghost rider” glanced my way, calling my name.

The course of things taken with a wide angle lens, show patterns happening over and over, looping endlessly. Perhaps you agree. Fate insists we revisit, experience all over again in another setting, with a new supporting cast, the self-that-we are, and the country/society which we’ve always been. Things are as they must be. There is a sliver of hope though, a flash of lightning on the horizon.

I hear a name, my name called. A faceless rider admonishes — that I own the advantages accrued to me personally: the result of a bygone slave economy; and the advantage of class that I enjoy as a white guy with an extraordinary education, to recognize my role in a society which gives “thumbs up” to guys, for jobs, promotions, etc.. As a brute fact, white men start in the front of the line…  Here, wrestling with words to convey what I am feeling, I am that “cowboy” whose name is called.

An old cowboy went riding out
One dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested
As he went along his way

When all at once a mighty herd
Of red eyed cows he saw
Plowin’ through the ragged skies
And up the cloudy draw

Their brands were still on fire
And their hooves were made of steel
Their horns were black and shiny
And their hot breath he could feel

A bolt of fear went through him
As they thundered through the sky
For he saw the riders coming hard
And he heard their mournful cry

Yippie-yi-o
Yippie-yi-yay
Ghost riders in the sky

Their faces gaunt
Their eyes were blurred
Their shirts all soaked with sweat
He’s riding hard to catch that herd
But he ain’t caught ’em yet

‘Cause they’ve got to ride forever
On that range up in the sky
On horses snorting fire
As they ride on, hear their cry

As the riders loped on by him
He heard one call his name
‘If you wanna save your soul
From hell a-riding on our range

Then, cowboy, change your ways today
Or with us you will ride
Trying to catch the devil’s herd
Across these endless skies

Yippie-yi-o
Yippie-yi-yay
Ghost riders in the sky

Ghost riders in the sky
Ghost riders in the sky

Songwriter: Stanley Jones