cahn

I was listening to Pandora today and a song from Les Miserables came on. (They must recently have gotten the rights, as Les Mis songs had to my knowledge never shown up before.) It catapulted me back to the first time I ever saw Les Mis -- I was in middle school at the time -- and it blew my mind and knocked me flat, in large part because it was the first real Broadway musical I'd ever seen, partially because it was first adaptation of a book I'd ever seen where they actually got the spirit of the book right. I can't even describe the effect seeing it had on me except by saying that I went out and bought not just the recording but the full symphonic recording -- and when I was that age the $30 that you had to shell out for the full recording was basically a real fortune, something like six months' worth of discretionary spending. (To compare, I don't think I bought any other CD that was more than $5 until I went to college.)

Now that I'm older, I can see the flaws. Many of the tunes are simplistic bordering on inane (no, I never did like "Castle on a Cloud" much). Much of the libretto is quite silly (especially Cosette's lines). I suspect if I saw it now I would think it was okay, but nothing special. I'm really glad I saw it as a kid, when it had the power to do that to me.

The only other things I can think of offhand that had this effect on me were reading The Dark is Rising and A Wrinkle in Time, both of which I got to at precisely the right time (fourth grade and, um, second grade? respectively) for them to turn my world upside down and explode it into color. (And no, LoTR didn't do that for me -- I grew into that one.) Oh, and Dead Poets Society, which I now recognize as a maudlin sentimental film, but which I saw when I had no idea about poetry (fifth grade, I think), and it had a profound and dizzying effect on me.

I'd love to hear the things that you found extraordinarily powerful at the time and that now you wouldn't quite be so impressed by...