Amy Nguyen

Lyrics from Cole Porter

“Times have changed,
And we’ve often rewound the clock…”

Muffled singing from my sister’s phone drowns out the muffled arguments on the other side of the door. She sings along to the track as I listen in awe. Anything Goes was the first musical I’ve ever heard.

The song itself is quite careless; a woman on a ship shouts at how “the world has gone mad today, good’s bad today, black’s white today,” and other contrasting phrases for how now, “anything goes”—a tumble of words that my sister has remembered in her reverie. If anything goes, then listening to musicals to block out the outside world worked for us.

It was odd listening to those songs. I remember very little of my life surrounding those showtunes, except I’ve never heard of a proper musical, and I was confused by all the adults arguing. I suppose my first time listening to a musical was muddled by the first time I was experiencing a funeral.

The death itself was shocking, but not surprising. Grandma was already in her 70s, and the risk of having a stroke is higher when you’re older. But as a barely-qualified tween, I didn’t know the concept of death so intimately until it hit my family. Was it 2016, 2017, what year? It didn’t matter. One day she was alive, and the next day she was gone. I guess in the turmoil, my world had gone mad that day.

Surely, shock is enough to wipe the slate clean because I cannot recall more beyond those songs. A sea shanty, a jaunty trumpet solo, ensemble cheers and tap dancing replace whatever crying I could’ve heard. Maybe it was my sister’s way of handling it too. She would sing and dance along like nothing had happened and I was inclined to join her too. We danced like no one was watching, like no world was watching, like nothing was bad. I suppose the world did go mad, if the only way we could cope was to sing it away.

The whole point of the musical was to go along with the craziness on the ship, that amid the emotional drama of the intersecting stories, the world would just let it happen. As the ocean liner made its way to London, the world went on its merry way, uncaring of whatever troubles happened. Perhaps our struggle to understand was simply a story to the world, with our little boat of trouble that kept sailing to a new land of comprehension. 

One day we would cope. But not now, when we could dance and sing and laugh it away instead.

“And though I’m not a great romancer,
I know that you’re bound to answer,
When I propose,
Anything goes!”