REFLECTIONS

Lessons from Broadway

His name didn’t’ make it into the title of a Broadway musical like the young woman characterized by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe as My Fair Lady. But the personalities of Professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle are an interesting contrast in it. Stubbornly unwilling to seek understanding, Professor Higgins arrogantly expressed his opinions in a monologue that women were irrational compared to the logic of a man.

Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

Men are so decent, such regular chaps. Ready to help you through any mishaps.

Ready to buck you up whenever you are glum. Why can’t a woman be a chum?

Why is thinking something women never do? Why is logic never even tried? Straightening up their hair is all they ever do.

Why can’t a woman behave like a man? If I was a woman who’d been to a ball, been hailed as a princess by one and by all;

Would I start weeping like a bathtub overflowing?

And carry on as if my home were in a tree?

Would I run off and never tell me where I’m going?

Why can’t a woman be like me?

In contrast to Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Rogers and Hammerstein introduced Broadway to a school teacher named Anna. In the King and I, Anna had a lesson to teach about understanding—Getting to Know You.

Gettin’ to know you, Gettin’ to know all about you.
Gettin’ to like you, Gettin’ to hope you like me.

Gettin’ to know you, Putting it my way but nicely.
You are precisely, My cup of tea.

Gettin’ to know you, Gettin’ to feel free and easy.
When I am with you, Gettin’ to to know what to say.
Haven’t you noticed, Suddenly I ‘m bright and breezy,
Because of all the beautiful and new Things I’m learning about you
Day by day.

So through the lessons from Broadway—Getting to Know You—to the advice of Stephen Covey cited last week— “seek first to understand, then to be understood,”—and the teaching of Proverbs—that a man of understanding delights in wisdom (Proverbs 10:23)—pursue understanding, for understanding is a fountain of life to those who have it.

You are the light of the world,

Richard +

www.reflectingthesavior.org.

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