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My connection to Steve began as a teenager (don’t get the wrong idea). Yes, I knew all the words to WEST SIDE and GYPSY and even FORUM (I was a very precocious kid, and a determined show album princess-in-training). But I don’t think I really understood what Steve Sondheim’s work was all about. That didn’t happen until ANYONE CAN WHISTLE. No, I didn’t see it; as Angela Lansbury, who starred in the original 9-performance run said in a recent interview, if everyone who says they saw it actually had seen it, it would have run for years. But I did have a ticket for it, to a Saturday matinee in May, and as I did in those days, I bought all seven daily newspapers (yes, there were seven) to read the opening night reviews. They ranged from angry to dismissive to ecstatic, and I was really eager to see it (a show about nonconformity, kind of a musical version of A THOUSAND CLOWNS, I thought). Amazingly, the damn show closed; even with stars like Lee Remick, Angela Lansbury and Harry Guardino, the reviews killed it (thanks again, NY Times) and it disappeared. Filled with early 60s teenage rage and youthful disappointment, I returned my ticket to the Majestic Theatre and got a refund of my $2.50 (yes, that’s what shows cost for the last row or two in the balcony in 1964!)

Several weeks later, on my way to see SHE LOVES ME (a miraculous show worth its own blog), I stopped by Sam Goody’s record store, as I did every Saturday before my weekly theatre matinee, to see what new original cast recordings had been released. Imagine my surprise when I found a double-fold album of WHISTLE, complete with photos of the production, as though the show was a big hit and would run for years. See, all shows got recorded on the first Sunday after they opened, and even though WHISTLE was already gone, Goddard Lieberson, then-head of Columbia Records, thought so much of the score, he went ahead and recorded it anyway as a labor of love, and the score was dedicated by Steve to Lieberson as a thank you.

So I bought the album, somehow knowing, from all the reviews I had read, that this was no HELLO DOLLY or FUNNY GIRL, the two biggest hits of the season, but something quite different. Even then, when I got it home and started to play it, my precocity was not quite sufficient to fathom the blaring orchestral chords of the overture, the Kay Thompson-like pizzazz of “Me and My Town” or anything else on side one. Confused and ready to put it aside, I flipped the album over and set the needle down on side two, and on came the plaintive voice of Lee Remick singing the title tune. It was the first day of the rest of my life. I sat dumbfounded, listening to her sing this deceptively simple song about “what’s hard is simple, what’s natural comes hard”…and I began to weep. I played the song over and over that night, and for many nights throughout my life. Steve somehow understood what it was like to be different, to be unlike everyone else, and it spoke to me as nothing else in my first fifteen years of life ever had before. Steve touched my soul in ways I was too young to understand, but his work from that moment forward had a profound effect on the rest of my life.

I never again missed a Sondheim show, and one viewing was never enough. From the Yale swimming pool at the world premiere of THE FROGS to the legendary “puzzle album” tribute (where Steve, tears streaming down his face, ended the evening as the replacement for dear friend Lee Remick, with a simple, poignant performance of “Anyone Can Whistle”) to a performance of FOLLIES in Ann Arbor where the four leads were played by the original four Broadway juveniles now playing their older selves 30 years later. Hundreds of performances over 40-odd years (50 really, if you count the original GYPSY with Merman, and why not?), thousands of hours of my life devoted to the man and his art. And that doesn’t include playing Senex in FORUM for the Gay Men’s Chorus or producing WHISTLE, YOU’RE GONNA LOVE TOMORROW and COMPANY off-Broadway with my spouse, Tom Klebba, under our production company, aptly named Opening Doors (and when I found it had already been used, I chose Something Familiar as an alternate name, of course).

And now we’re about to get the Encores revival of WHISTLE with an amazing cast: Sutton Foster, Donna Murphy and Raul Esparza! That’s another wow. And his birthday bash at Lincoln Center this past week was as exciting and heartfelt as any Sondheim evening I have spent.

So happy birthday, Steve, and thank you for enriching all our lives for so many years. And as a final quote from Steve from his legendary talk at the 92nd Street Y:

“I had a bow-off line, it’s a quote from COMPANY. It’s when April says, “I don’t have anything more to say.” I have a lot more to say, but I don’t have anything more to say. Thank you.”

No…thank you.

While some of her films are considered classics, it is generally the performances of their male stars that are remembered: Burt Lancaster in ELMER GANTRY (he deservedly won the Oscar, while Ms. Simmons’ equally unforgettable portrayal of Sister Sharon Falconer was not even nominated); Olivier’s HAMLET (she was nominated at the age of 19 as Ophelia, but Olivier won two Oscars as star and producer); Sinatra and Brando in GUYS AND DOLLS (their egos and acting styles got all the press, but it was Jean who stole the picture and got a Golden Globe as well).

But watch the aching beauty of her performances in such dramas as ALL THE WAY HOME and HOME BEFORE DARK (both sadly unavailable on home video) or in the tv miniseries THE THORN BIRDS; she could command the screen with her stillness and her small gestures and quietly break your heart. And when given the chance, all too seldom, she could cut loose as a terrfic comedienne, as she does as the daffy best friend in the little-known Cary Grant gem, THE GRASS IS GREENER, or in the delighftul THE ACTRESS, where she portrays the young Ruth Gordon as a fledgeling actress. Even the disappointing THE HAPPY ENDING, where she is front and center as an alcoholic wife going through a divorce, seems a whole lot better than it is thanks to her portrayal. And some of us were lucky enough to see her shine on stage, in the national touring company and London edition of the brilliant Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler musical classic, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC.

In short, she could do it all, and perhaps because of that, she never quite got her due as one of the screen’s great actresses. There are many great stars who were so good in so many different types of movies (Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Doris Day) that the Oscar eluded them throughout their working careers. Sadly, Jean Simmons now joins that illustrious group, but happily for all of us, a number of her great performances can be seen and enjoyed on home video, and Chelsea Pines will always proudly feature the Jean Simmons room.

Nellie has made her mark as singer/songwriter/arranger/animal right activist, and her albums chart on Billboard and Amazon.com in the top 100 with regularity. Now she has taken all her passions and combined them into an amazing recording called “Normal as Blueberry Pie,” a tribute album to the songs and style of singer/actress/animal right activist Doris Day. Ms. Day, whose career spanned the early 1940s as a big-band singer, then a top recording artist and Hollywood actress through the mid-60s, and finally the star of a regrettably dopey TV series until the early 70s, has taken an unfair beating in tbe film and music field until recent years and a more comprehensive look at her amazing career. With virtually all her films now available on DVD and most of her recordings on CD and MP3, and several recent books that examine her personal and professional lives, Ms. Day can now be seen for what she really was: a show business phenomenon that will probably never be repeated again.

Now 87 and living totally out of the spotlight, Ms. Day continues to own the pet-friendly Cypress Inn Hotel in the picturesque town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calfornia, where guests are encouraged to vacation with their cats and dogs. While she rarely if ever appears in public, her popularity has reached a new peak in the 21st century. The fact is that Nellie McKay has produced this new recording, which brings Doris to a whole new (and much younger) music-listening audience, as an homage to Ms. Day’s unique style and sound, without attempting to offer an imitation but more a suggestion of Ms. Day’s artistry.

True, Doris was saddled with some really poor song choices by her then-husband (who famously lost all her money in bad investments while signing her to a TV-series contract without telling her, and then dying and leaving her to clean up the mess), and at least one of them (the title song from the lame “Send Me No Flowers,” suprisingly by Bachrach and David) does surface on this album, and time hasn’t made it any better. However, from the hundreds of songs Doris recorded over a 20-year period, Ms. McKay’s other choices are generally terrific, including the first song that made Doris a singing superstar (“Sentimental Journey”) and one of her last recorded songs, “Close Your Eyes” (from an amazing album with music great Andre Previn called “Duet”). Other highlights are “Mean to Me” (from what is arguably Doris’ finest film performance, as singer Ruth Etting in “Love Me or Leave Me”) and the Rodgers and Hammerstein chestnut “Wonderful Guy” (from “South Pacific,” one of the films Doris should have made, with apologies to Mitzi Gaynor). Ms. McKay even includes an original song, “If I Ever Had a Dream,” written and sung in the best Doris Day style.

It’s taken too many years for Ms. Day to receive her due (she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and a Lifetime Grammy in 2008), and her final years of performing in films and TV were formulaic, to say the least. How different would her legacy had been if she had accepted the offer to star as Mrs. Robinson in the late-60s classic film “The Graduate”? Watch her performances in such classics as “Pillow Talk,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and aforementioned “Love Me or Leave Me” and you can see what an amazing and natural talent she had. And now we can listen to both Nellie McKay and Doris Day and revel in their very different but equally amazing musicality.

And we know that both Doris and Nellie would love Charlie Chaplin, our hotel mascot (he’s really the owner, I only do what he tells me).

Okay, we all know that Judy Garland had died, the cops were doing their usual bust of gay bars (this time the Stonewall on Christopher Street), and the drag queens and other queers finally said, “no more!” All right, it wasn’t that simple, but all the years of community repression came to a boil in that singular moment, and an entire movement was born (at least in New York City; not sure that San Francisco needed that epiphany to gather momentum, but it certainly gave the green light to other urban areas around the country that it was time to kick open those closet doors and come out into the street and into the light). Our world, and the world at large, would never be the same again. While it is true that we are impatiently waiting for our hoped-for human rights breakthrough from our current administration, we must take stock of the fact that we have made incredible strides in ONLY 40 YEARS; it took women and ethnic minorities a lot longer (and still does) to accomplish what the LGBT community has done in such a short time. When President Obama was face to face with an octogenarian lesbian colleague of mine at his recent LGBT White House meet-and-greet, she looked him straight (?) in the eye and said, “When will I have the same rights as everyone else?” He looked right back at her and said that it would happen by the time his term of office was over. Let us take heart and be patient but vigilant.

For those of you were alive during that fateful summer, watching astronaut Neil Armstrong take his “first small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” as he did his now-historical moonwalk, is something you will never forget. Many of us thought at the time that by now we would routinely be flying to the moon, to Mars, to other galaxies. Human mistakes, lack of funding and perhaps an inability for our country to dream have slowed things down considerably; now, if you can afford beaucoup bucks, a ride on a rocketship may be yours, but for the rest of us, it really is only a dream. When Walter Cronkite passed away last month, we were reminded of that historical moments and how we all felt and thought and dreamed, even while the war in Vietnam raged on. A paradoxical time, to be sure.

No, I didn’t make it to Woodstock, and I didn’t actually know anyone who did, but the tales have become more fanciful over the years, and you might think that everyone in their teens and twenties were there, but you would be wrong (it’s like all the theatregoers who swear they saw ANYONE CAN WHISTLE or CARRIE in their original incarnations; if it were true, those shows would still be running). But we all took the same drugs, listened to the same music and did our best to score with our sexual partners of choice. As I mentioned earlier, TAKING WOODSTOCK, which is yet another coming-of-age, coming-out story, doesn’t even really conjure up the music of the day (perhaps the rights were too expensive), and only pretends to get its bell-bottom jeans dirty with mud and rain. Save your money, go to Amazon and buy the new special edition of WOODSTOCK, which includes amazing footage of the singers and the songs and three days of peace and love.

And finally, my coming out…well, let’s just say it was something akin to Columbus discovering America. I mean, I always knew it was there, but it was the repressive 1950s and the exploding 1960s, and frankly, I was just overwhelmed. Yeah, I had a couple of gay sexual encounters, but I always beat a hasty retreat back to the closet, where I was starved and stangled but safe. But in the summer of ’69, thanks to a new feeling in the air, in the world, I finally allowed myself to feel, to be my true self…and to sleep with three guys, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes just one at a time, but oh what a time it was. I was 20 and suddenly I could conquer the world as a gay man. There were many bumps and many obstacles still to come, but at that moment in time, none of it mattered. Many “relationships” followed this time, and ultimately the two relationships that formed and forged my life (my late partner Sheldon, my beloved husband Tom) were still to come, but for the first time in my life I could begin to understand what I was about and why I was here at all.

So a 21-gun-salute to the 40th anniversary of what was, in many ways, the first year of me.