By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO –Eighteen years ago tomorrow, March 8, 1998, the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, then home to the mega-hit Cats, had its lights go dim. The music stopped, the dancing halted as the news spread of the death of 44 year-old artiste, Laurie Beechman. For longer than anyone, she had been “Grizabella”—the Memory Cat, the show-stopping chanteuse of liquid eyes and a voice that was God’s acoustic.
Laurie Beechman lived heroically with ovarian cancer for nine years. She was my friend and the inspiration for my two daughters as they made their way through the elaborate journey of childhood and adolescence. Not every youngster has a true artist in his or her life to edify, illuminate, to challenge, to offer access through so many stage doors. My daughters, grieving, knowing and grateful, were deepened by this experience in all its dimensions.
I first saw and heard Laurie in 1982. The diminutive contralto with the large presence lyrically performed as the pivotal “Narrator” in Broadway’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Donning a fez, with good spirits, expressive hands, and a grandiloquent voice, she sang the biblical tale with the range of a rainbow. Returning home, I wrote the actress a note, thanking her for her performance.
To my surprise and delight, a handwritten response came not too long afterwards. Beechman expressed her appreciation, and encouraged me to follow her career. Within a few weeks, I joined a theater full of admirers who had also come to hear the newly acclaimed Tony nominee. We became friends, sharing a subsequent 16 years of happy and bitter milestones, and extending our mutual care into the larger circles of our respective families. In due time, I buried her father, performed her wedding ceremony, and for years was privileged to exchange letters with her insightful mother, who, like Laurie herself, is a paradigm of human dignity.
My daughters and I brought a Hanukkah menorah to her dressing room one December and we sang the festival blessings, joined by other members of the-then cast of Les Miserables. What a choir!
It was not five years after her initial success in Cats at the Winter Garden that life changed for the gifted chanteuse. The fateful diagnosis came in late 1988. For Laurie, however, it was not going to be the question of her death; it was going to be the answer of her life. She surely passed through bouts of physical and spiritual distress. A burgeoning career unquestionably was diverted; it would, fittingly, be lifted by her acquired wisdom and her plain bravery.
Her fourth album, a poignant and wise collection of hopeful ballads called “No One Is Alone,” caught the ear of someone preparing the program for President Bill Clinton’s second Inaugural festivities. Laurie was selected to sing the climactic number on a nationally televised gala the night before the swearing-in ceremonies in Washington. Her voice rang out like honey from a rock; hard-boiled officials and sundry celebrities, knowing that this woman was singing for her life, wiped their eyes. My friend concluded her song, and announced, trembling: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!”
It never was easy, but it always was meaningful. Inspired by her family, especially her mother, Laurie Beechman did not permit her illness to distract from her inner commitment to creativity. “What I want is normal,” Laurie once told me about her view of living and loving. And what was normal for her was to make music. Whenever Laurie sang, she was spiritually protected against the encroachment of her mortal predicament. She taught her friends to value life.
I remember in the spring of 1991, when Laurie sang at the temple I then served, she just had endured her first recurrence of the disease. She was incandescent and thankful to be singing again. After her performance, she gleefully ran into my study, grabbing both my arms in exaltation. “I can do this,” she cried, “I can do this even with chemotherapy.”
We can all do more with the time we have, dear Laurie.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer who may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)