No Quick Fix

On History and Health Riffs in the musical, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson:

“If it’s chafed, put some lotion on it.”

– some practical advice, offered by the character portraying Andrew Jackson, speaking toward the audience in the last scene of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a play written and directed by Alex Timbers

Yesterday I had occasion to see the outrageous politico–emo-rock musical, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which recently moved to Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. The production focuses on the life and times of the 7^th President of the United States.

Now, Old Hickory comes on like a rock star. The story is narrated, in part, by an excitable, graying Jackson groupie who bumps around the stage in a motorized wheelchair. A wild and rattling cast sets the thing’s tone in a startling first number, “Populism, Yea, Yea!” An early review of this musical, toward the end of its early 2008 LA run, cites these lyrics:

Sometimes you have to take the initiative.
Sometimes your whole family dies of cholera.
Sometimes you have to make your own story.
Sometimes you have to shoot the storyteller in the neck.
Sometimes you have to take back the country…

(These words antedate the Tea Party, to which the play vigorously alludes in its current form.)

You get the idea: it’s lively, a bit disjointed and politically relevant. And fun. It messes with the facts, and is tangentially rife with medical topics:

In the play, Jackson’s father, upon witnessing the whoosh and arrow-in-her-back slaying of Jackson’s mother in a backwoods cabin somewhere in South Carolina or Tennessee, immediately and without hesitation attributes her death to cholera. A moment later, he and a cheery cobbler are felled by similar instruments. The future President Andrew Junior, who’s playing with toy cowboys and Indians while both of his parents are shot dead in this life-motivating scene of pseudo-history, refers later to his parents’ deaths from cholera.

Most historical sources and Jackson’s Tennessee home’s current website, attribute the mother’s death to cholera. According to a scholarly review of cholera epidemics in the 19^th Century, the disease didn’t appear in North America until after 1831 or so. A fascinating, original New York Times story details the ravaging effects of this illness in Tennessee in 1873, but that would be long after Jackson’s death in 1837.

An unexpected medical writer’s gem of a song, “Illness As Metaphor,” cuts to the heart with a message about blood, symbolism, love and Susan Sontag’s classic essays on the meaning of tuberculosis and cancer in literature and in life. The lyrics of the song from Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson are hard-to-find on-line, but you can get it through iTunes, by which I found these words:

A wise woman once wrote that illness is not metaphor.
So why do I feel sick when I look at you?
There is this illness in me and I need to get it out, so when I bleed
It’s not blood, it’s a metaphor for love.
These aren’t veins just the beating of my heart.
This fever isn’t real it represents how I feel…

You can see a Spanish-sung, sickly romantic version on a YouTube video:

I’m not sure how Susan Sontag would feel about emo-rock in general and about this song in particular, but I should save that subject for some intense, future writing project –

A few other medical digs include mention of Jackson’s hepatitis – acquired on “the battlefield,” as he explains to his admirers, syphilis – a killer of Indians and, consistent with the play’s hemi-modern approach, Valtrex – which some of the prostitute-turned government advisees run to get when it’s given for free.

All in all, it’s a terrific play about Americans, Manifest Destiny, populism, anti-elitism, economic frustration, anger toward foreigners, fear of terrorism, emotions and the founding of the Democratic Party.

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Tomorrow is Election Day. Remember to vote!

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• Old and New Music, on Dying to Give Birth