Though my immediate family are not theater folk, they are in every way theatrical. My great-great-aunt is said to have run a bar in Harlem called The Spot, and somewhere there is a libretto, pen-ned by one of the clientele, based on her place. Her grandnephew, my father, performed in Aida, in a production at the Met with Leontyne Price, and had to remove his glasses. When he fell over the soldier in front of him while heading to the gates of Thebes, this domino effect ended my father's stage career. But that didn't stop the singing, or the riotous renditions of "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" and "Shall We Dance?" when his mother, who was in the audience the day her son went down, showed up at our house and hit the piano.

In listening to these tales over the years, I learned something vital: the theater-and by theater, in this case, I mean the kind that can be sung-was where all the fun was. And if you couldn't be on the stage-how interesting that none of us were-at the very least, you got as near to it as possible, even if it was sitting, rapt, in the audience.

There were family myths regarding the theater, and there were also the myths-more legends-of the theater. My father spoke of Ethel Merman and Mary Martin in hushed tones: the greatest, none other than, who will replace them? But these were stars-the likes of which I'd never know!-whom I would not have the opportunity to see perform, though I listened to the original cast recordings religiously. While my ten-year-old peers were into rock and disco, I had dreams of running off with some kind of troupe and would regale my friends, held captive and curious in my room, as I stood on my bed and belted out "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" and "There's No Business Like Show Business." And "Some Enchanted Evening"-because South Pacific, with its score that moved from playful to romantic to sober to beseeching, had managed to seem familiar from the first time I slid the record from its sleeve, the gold anchor, with two hearts imprinted with the stars' dazzling faces.

Though I'd had the pleasure of seeing much on Broadway-Annie was a big favorite at the time-I was too young to have seen Mary Martin in South Pacific, or in anything else, for that matter. But even I recognized the uniqueness of her voice-equal parts girlish and powerful-and the range of the score from the recordings I played on my little red plastic record player. You gotta have a dream...You do, You do! I thought in all my elementary-school science classes, at soccer practice, as I sketched apples and pitchers in art class. You've got to be carefully taught...You do! You do! I heard the refrain when racial tensions at my public school teemed, and when Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed to the Supreme Court. But I had no idea how radical that song once was, or that it almost didn't make it into the production due to its commentary on racial prejudice.

Musicals were my primary frame of reference, but a musical is so much more than its score and, cut off from the experience of this production-as everyone from my generation has been, since it hasn't been seen on Broadway but once, in 1949-I hadn't pictured a story, or the characters, and how all of them, even the islanders invaded by the American Navy, navigated this exotic world as outsiders. And what the hell was Bali Ha'i anyway? Bali Ha'i-the place, the state of mind, the unattainable dream-I could tell even from the bad sound quality, was what made South Pacific different than all the other musicals I listened to, legs kicking in the air as I, lying on my stomach, set down the needle over and over.

I believed that when the characters could no longer bear the strength of their emotions they were forced into song. Unfortunately, in the movie I would see as an adult, that overwhelmed quality that makes our skin tingle and goose-bump is conveyed through Tech-nicolor, the film turning bright shades of purple and orange during the songs, as if they themselves were far too much for celluloid to handle. Who needed the velvet painting effect?

No one, I realized, when I finally saw South Pacific at the Brunswick Music Theater at Bowdoin with my mother's mother, who lived in Portland, Maine. This side of the family was decidedly less dramatic, a family of lawyers and judges, theater neophytes. Though K.K. Preece and Lawrence Brooks, who played Nellie and Emile, were not Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, I was captivated. Suddenly, the familiar songs previously unconnected but for the scratchy needles, were stitched together by a narrative in which even I, a twelve-year-old girl from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. (I had weathered an affair of the heart, or two, one with a half-Japanese boy!, as well as many dreams already unrealized), could see my life in every character, wanting and needing, wallowing in emotion, a stranger in a strange land. It was not Mary Martin, and the performance may not have had the brilliant staging that I've since read about, but holding my grandmother's dry, chalky hand that evening, smelling her scent of wax and roses, is one of my clearest memories.

"You know, your father's uncle died in the South Pacific during the war," my grandmother said, marching back to her Oldsmobile after the show, her wooden purse with Paris! painted on the side hooked to her elbow.

I stopped suddenly. He did? And then I thought, Where's that? Because the South Pacific didn't exist as a place; it had become, in that performance, everywhere on earth.

Many years later, I would approach an island by sea and I would think of Bali Ha'i-so far away, with so much promise, such untold delights and exotic customs! But what an island looks like from afar is so different from what it looks like when you've landed on it. (Lieutenant Cable could surely attest to this, as could anyone who has got exactly what she's wished for.)

I was getting married on a Cycladic island, to a Greek whose mother lived there. While marrying in the Mediterranean bears little resemblance to being stationed during wartime, there is something to be said for entering an unknowable world unaware of the cultural baggage in tow. My mother-in-law cared only about her rehearsal dinner, which was to be in a village in the mountains, where she was born. All she would discuss was the menu-goat on a spit; rooster for the unheard-of vegetarians-the wildflowers, and the music for this night. The wedding? The only way it was done on that island was at a Greek Orthodox church, but ours was to be at a taverna, by the sea. "But people go to the church to get married!" we were told.

We bucked tradition; we did it our own way, not realizing we could not take only what we wished for our island wedding. As a result, no one from my husband's side of the family showed up for the ceremony. Our wedding, on this Greek island where I was a foreigner, was peopled by our American friends and family, the groom's side empty but for my mother-in-law. I will never forget her sitting alone in the front row, sunglasses on, her hands folded in her lap. (To be fair, her daughter stood with us.) But everyone had come to that dinner in the mountains, staying well into the night, stuffing themselves with goat and tzatziki, screaming at one another in Greek. I remember thinking how strange it was that, nestled safely in New York City, clichéd in its diversity, I had not thought about the consequences of feeling very far from home.

South Pacific asks what it means to be a stranger from the moment the curtain opens. That sensibility has always informed my nature, but it was made concrete on my wedding day. In the end, of course, I left the island; I only visit in summer, much to the envy of many. Spoiler alert: Nellie stays. But she's the only one; by the end of the musical, even the enemy has gone home.

Long before my wedding, I discovered I was not meant for the stage, or, rather, it wasn't meant for me. I took acting classes, but, at ease in front of an audience of one, I got the giggles or blushed red in front of many. I was shy and embarrassed onstage, unable to live up to its many ghosts, or to the piles of myths that interpreted for me what it means to perform. Recently, I watched the only existing recording of South Pacific-a dress rehearsal of the 1952 London production. There's no audience present, giving an eerie effect of two ghosts moving through a faraway landscape I have come to know in many contexts. Every production and performance echoes the one before it in its staging, in the lilt of each song-here, in Mary Martin's tiny waist, her charming voice-but with headphones strapped on in my little carrel at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, with no audience to guide my emotions, I was inside it for the very first time. It was filmed, in parts, from the balcony, and the effect was also like watching a dream: a kiss from the past that was my father's mother swaying on the piano bench, pounding that piano like it had once broken her heart; my grandmother looking ahead on the dark highway as we made our way home after the show; and also pulling away from that island, the whitewashed villages and monasteries built into cliffs receding into the Aegean. It was almost as if I could just step into the story, my story, and sing.

Jennifer Gilmore is the author of Golden Country, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in many publications, including BookForum, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Salon. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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