When I was six years old, my parents took me to see *Oliver!* It was a big deal to go to the movies — and this was my first movie musical. I adored everything about it: the singing, the dancing, the costumes, the sets, the story, the songs. But there was one scene in particular that I never forgot: when Oliver, all alone in the dark basement of that lonely London orphanage, sang “Where Is Love?” in his beautiful soprano little boy’s voice. His song cracked open my heart.
Even as a very young girl, I got it—though I certainly would not have been able to articulate it in these grown-up words: Oliver’s plaintive plea was the impetus for everything that happened, not just to him but to everyone in that movie. An orphaned boy desperately missing his mother—trying to believe that somehow, against all odds, he will find love, family, connection, safety, and hope—enters a whole world of people also looking for love wherever they can find it too.
Think about it — without understanding what drove Oliver, the whole rest of the story doesn’t make sense. He joins a band of thieves — because they feel like way more like family than the people who were supposed to take care of him — his own relatives, the people in the orphanage.
Now, the head of that band of thieves — Fagin — purposely sets himself up as a father figure to his band of pickpocket boys — with The Artful Dodger acting like a big brother. The other male figure, Bill Sykes, is scary and mean — except when it comes to Nancy. The woman he loves — Nancy, a former child prostitute and pickpocket. Nancy befriends sweet Oliver and becomes a surrogate mother figure to him. Which ends up softening Bill toward Oliver, too. Love.
However, at the moment in the film when Bill feels Nancy has betrayed him, he kills her — and then realizes he’s killed, essentially, himself. Without love, what is life? He later dies as well.
But despite all the horrors of his young life, Oliver never loses his pure faith in the power of Love — and that’s what saves him in the end.
That movie — it was clear to me as a kid — was all about Love. But no one said that.
Now, I want to say here that seeing that movie and hearing that song was not the first time I understood there were people in the world who did not lead the incredibly privileged life I did. I grew up watching TV reports about the death and destruction of the Vietnam War, the hatred and hope of the civil rights movement. The nightly news brought heartbreaking images of starving children in Africa into our living room. Their anguished faces, their distended bellies, and their mouths encrusted with flies shook me to my core. Oliver’s made-up movie misery could not hold a candle to what I saw every night on television.
But it’s easy to find ways to distance ourselves from the horrors we see and hear and read about. That’s why story is so important. We humans are hardwired to learn through story. It’s how we understand everything.
My parents were adamant that they never wanted me to be a spoiled rich kid. They always made it clear that I had been given a remarkable life as the daughter of a movie star living in a mansion in sunny Southern California. They did not try to shelter me. But they were not trying to scare me either.
From the time I was a little girl, I understood that with privilege comes a responsibility to give something back to other people and to our planet. That was how they lived their lives, it was how their closest friends lives theirs, and it was how they wanted me to live mine.
What got to me about that song was I understood(was understanding/was that I understood) for the first time that no matter what a person’s story or circumstances might be, every single being in the world wants the same thing: *to love and to be loved.*
In other words, Love is the ONE THING THAT UNITES US.
So, why aren’t we taught that when we’re younger?
Wouldn’t it just be easier if someone said straight up — at the end of your life, all you’ll remember is the love and all you’ll regret are the missed opportunities for love. And love doesn’t only mean people. It means your pets, what you do for work, what you love to do in your free time, the things you do to give back. All that is love — and nothing else matters. So, in everything you do, every single day, ask yourself, am I doing this with love? Am I making this choice from a place of love? Am I behaving in a loving way? Then go from there.
No one says that.
And worse — we’re inundated with movies and books and TV shows in which love looks like nothing like real life — and then we wonder why we’re so confused!
For over fifty years now, the words of that song I heard in Oliver have sung themselves through my mind and heart over and over again. They have been a leitmotif of my life. Little did I know as a six-year-old sitting between my parents in a movie theater that the question posed in that song would become the impetus for my lifelong spiritual journey: *Where Is Love?*
The answer, of course, is all around us.
I’m a walker. I walk three or four times a day — a short walk around the block to clear my head, or a longer walks in any direction. Yes, I walk for my dog Allie. I walk because I drive a lot and need to stretch my legs, because I work at a computer all day and need to get away from a screen, and because I live in a tiny home where the walls start to close in. Yes, I walk because movement always makes me feel better. But really I walk because on every single walk, I feel love. Whether it’s watching people’s faces light up when they see my dog, or hearing the sound of a beautiful bird, or right now all the gorgeous spring flowers. Waving at a neighbor. Chatting with someone on the street. Seeing kids in the school yard playing and hearing them laugh. I walk because I always find the answer to that song on my walk. Love is everywhere.
When I became a nomad, people thought I was nuts. I would feel lonely or displaced they told me. I didn’t. When I landed in a tiny town where I knew no one on the day the lockdown happened, how did I survive? Walking, waving at folks, standing six feet apart and getting to know my neighbors. I live in the most amazing neighborhood where I have the best group of friends who range from their thirties to their seventies. If that’s not proof that Love is everywhere, I don’t know what is.
So, if that’s true, how did we get so angry as a nation?
I admit that I’m shocked by the anger that is now the norm. The kinds of comments that crop up on Facebook are still unfathomable to me. I would have been sent to my room for a year if I’d said the kinds of things people now write on social media. It’s mean, angry — the grammar is terrible — name-calling at its worst.
I grew up surrounded by clever, witty, observant people who could throw shade and snark with the best of them. These people weren’t saints.
My stepmother, Coral Browne, became famous for what were called “Coral stories.” After someone left a party, Coral would sum them up with a nasty funny turn of phrase that would then circle the London theatre world for months.
People both dreaded and loved leaving a party before Coral. Because being the subject of a Coral story — even if it wasn’t exactly complimentary — meant you had been seen.
And everyone knew that, underneath her rapier wit, Coral had a heart of gold. She would take that wit and skewer anyone who messed with someone she loved.
Perhaps my favorite instance of this happened at a party in LA when a Hollywood screenwriter questioned the writing ability of her dear friend, writer Alan Bennett. Now, here’s my snark — how any Hollywood screenwriter of any ilk could think they could hold a candle to the brilliant Alan Bennett is beyond me. And if you don’t know his work — look it up. Watch or read or listen to the work of Alan Bennett.
In any case, this screenwriter came up to Coral after she’d won a BAFTA — the British Academy Award — for Best Actress in a television movie Bennett wrote for and about her.
He said, “Oh Miss Browne, you were simply marvelous in An Englishman Abroad. I absolutely your performance. It was pitch perfect. But I just wasn’t too sure about the writing.”
I wasn’t there, but in my mind, the room falls silence as Coral says — a voice that could be heard in Honolulu: “You weren’t too sure about the writing?” Her dramatic pause here to make sure everyone in the room was listening would have made Harold Pinter proud. “You weren’t too sure about the writing?” Then she pinned him with a Coral look (one I knew all too well). “You couldn’t write FUCK on a dusty Venetian blind.”
I love that story for so many reasons. How on earth did she come up with that one liner on the spur of the moment. I love it because she never failed to come to the aid of a friend. And I love it because it’s just FUNNY!
But it set me up to believe that judgment of others is not only okay, it’s warranted.
A few years ago, my best friend — who is a very very funny person —and I were walking along slinging clever one liners about the people we knew. Their clothes, partners, foibles. We loved doing this. Suddenly, she turned to me and said, “I don’t think we can keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Making fun of other people. We keep saying we’re trying to be better people, focus on our spiritual practices of kindness and gratitude. How does this fit with that?”
I stared at her as if she had just told me I had three eyes but I could only use two of them.
Because she was right.
So what I did say to her?
“Then what are we going to talk about? Will we even be interesting people?”
She laughed and said, “I have no idea. But it’s the right thing to do.”
It was. So we walked back in silence.
It took us a while to find other conversations as much fun or nearly as interesting as exercising our clever wits at the expense of others. But as we did, we realized we felt so much better.
When I was growing up, I was as scared of Coral’s wit and temper at the next person. And for me — an insecure pre-teen, teenager and twenty-something, being the perpetual subject of a Coral story was not a claim to fame. It was miserable. But I put up with it for four reasons.
1) My dad loved Coral and she loved him.
2) I loved Coral. I admired her, was awed by her.
3) I knew she loved me.
4) I also knew that she’d developed and honed that wit because she was afraid and insecure and it was her armor.
Taking off our armor — whatever it may be — because we’re so afraid that we’re not loved, not lovable, not capable of loving — is really really hard.
But we have to do it, because when we do, we realize Love is all around us.
Truly. Trust me on this.
And tune in to my next episode when we start to unpack what Love is. Love with the Big L.