Lists, Life, Love, and Television

I was talking to John Abramson of Harvard yesterday about holistic medicine and it got me thinking about my days as a conductor of musical theatre.

Back in those days, singers would come in and be concerned about one thing: how high they could "belt" (i.e. what notes they could hit cleanly in a "pop" voice — think Celine Dion.) It was all about the belting. Belting was the bench pressing of musical theatre — it wasn't "how good are you?", or "how much can you move me?" but "how high can you go?"

We do this all the time, Dr. Abramson argues, with cholesterol, a ridiculously bad marker for actual heart disease. Not "how healthy are you?" and "how long will you live disease free?", but "what's your cholesterol number?"

When I talk about antioxidants to lay audiences, I explain the ORAC ratings, which are a measure of the antioxidant power of a food. Now why don't they just measure the food to see how much individual vitamin C, E, etc it has? Because working together, antioxidants deliver a much stronger wallop than could be predicted by single values. The ORAC values tell you about their teamwork, which is more than the sum of their individual parts. In that way, antioxidants are like a rock and roll band. Can anyone sing Keith Richard's last single? Did he even make one? But I'll bet there's no one reading this who can't hum Satisfaction.

The Rolling Stones are a lot more than their component parts. So are foods. So are people. Hold that thought. I'll return to it in a moment.

If you looked at the Mona Lisa from an analytical point of view, you might notice that her smile is really a little crooked. And her eyes are kind of weird. And her hair might benefit from a visit to Kristoph's in Beverly Hills. Hardly a knockout recipe for beauty. Yet she's captivated art lovers for over two centuries and is still going strong.

Couple of years ago, I fell in love. When I went out on the "dating circuit" after my divorce, I had a "list." All the things I thought I needed to have in a mate. Quite a list that was. I fell in love with a woman who had very few things on the list. Ask me now if I would change one hair on her head. In fact, ask any man who is truly in love if he would "change" his loved one to better fit his "list." Better yet, ask a woman. They intuitively understand these things a lot better than men, since they are what's called "field dependent." In psych experiments, if you put a woman in a darkened enclosed space with no visual cues to distance and direction, they have a very hard time orienting; men, however, do it quite well. That's because men compartmentalize — they don't see the whole picture. That accounts for why Playboy sells, and Playgirl doesn't — at least not to women. Women intuitively respond to the whole picture. Men on the other hand, look at parts.

So women continually evaluate themselves cruelly with questions like "do I look fat in this?" having lost touch with their intuitive ability to respond to the whole, and instead believing the fiction that the their beauty and value is measured by the number of dimples of cellulite, the number of pounds on the scale, whether or not their nose is too crooked, their breasts too small, or their forehead too lined. Who can blame them? If we as a society can be collectively bamboozled into thinking that our cholesterol number is equivalent to our health, why wouldn't the number on the scale be equivalent to beauty?

Which brings me to television.

The best 15 minutes of fictional television ever shown since the invention of the box in the 1950's is, without any question, the final 15 minutes of the last episode of Six Feet Under. Opinionated though I may be, I'm usually open to discussion on most topics — not on this one. This just isn't open to debate. Nothing ever done on television equals the final 15 minutes of Six Feet Under for sheer brilliance and impact and noone who saw it will ever forget it. Case closed.

Now one of the many reasons that episode was so brilliant was the music. In particular, a song called Breathe Me. The song is unknown. No one ever heard of the artist. You can't buy the single, and the artist doesn't have her own album. It's not even on i-Tunes, for gods sake. The only way you can get it is by buying the soundtrack, which people in the know are doing in droves, largely on the strength of this song.

The singer can barely hold a note without her voice breaking. She has very limited range. She can hardly "belt." The musical range of the song stays within one octave. By any reasonable musical analysis, the song shouldn't work. It has nothing on the "list" of needed qualities for musical magic.

But it's one of the most brilliant records I've ever heard. I can't think of anything in the last decade that equals it for sheer emotional impact. It is an absolutely perfect mini-masterpiece, a perfect storm of mood, ambiance, longing, sadness, emotion, expression, and wisdom. You would no more change a note of it than you would colorize the Mona Lisa to make her look more like Pam Anderson.

Sometimes, in life, it's important to have a list. It helps you know where you're going; what you have to do. It keeps you focused on the ball. It keeps your goals in sight.

Wisdom is knowing when to throw the list away.