When I was a child, my mother and grandfather took me to see Anthony Quinn play Zorba the Greek in a live musical production. Or, when I was in my early twenties, my mother and grandfather took me to see Anthony Quinn play Zorba the Greek in a live musical production. The first experience is a cherished memory I’ve had, or thought I’ve had, for most of my life. The second is probably closer to the truth.
After recently telling an online friend about the childhood experience, I started wondering if I could actually verify the event. Memory fascinates me. My layman’s understanding is that remembering is as much an act of creation as of retrieval. Our brain is constantly reorganizing data, making new connections, and returning to our request for a memory, not an exact replay of what happened, but something “like” it.
What I found, when comparing the memory stored in my brain to the data stored on the internet, is that Zorba, the stage play, did a national tour in 1968. I would have been five years old. It did go to Boston, but Herschel Bernardi played the title role. Anthony Quinn starred in a revival in the 1980s, that also played in Boston. I would have been in my early 20s. It’s entirely possible that my mother lied about the man on stage being Quinn. This would have seemed important to me, because I loved the movie so much, but she likely knew that I would not be able to tell the difference, being a child, and being quite far from the stage. But there is one other snippet that I remember, or think I do. I have it in my head that my mother quietly commented to her father that, “he couldn’t really dance anymore the way he used to in his younger days.” This lends more credence to the idea that we did see Quinn, who would have been in his 60s during the revival production.
Could I really have been so swept away, as a young woman, by an experience so magical that I remember it as if I’d seen it through the eyes of a child? Yes, I absolutely think I could have. And even though it happened far later than I’d realized, I still credit the experience with sparking my love of live theater. Looking back, I’ve sometimes asked myself why I didn’t explore theater in high school and college. Maybe it was because I wasn’t actually exposed to it as early as I’d believed. Learning the truth behind the memory has not made me cherish it any less. If anything, it’s added another element to marvel at–the remarkable way our minds work. While my mother may not have been quite as impressed (she still very much enjoyed it), I will always remember Mr. Quinn dancing across that stage with every bit of the vigor a young Zorba would have displayed.