I learned that Stephen Sondheim had died while we were going up the escalator after seeing “House of Gucci.” I looked at my phone and there was a text from my mom:

Stephen Sondheim died today.

I gasped. I turned to Matt. “What? What is it?” he said. I showed him the text. “Oh no!” he said.

I came late to Sondheim. And it was Matt who finally made me a Sondheim devotee.

I don’t know why it took me so long. I grew up with musical theater. My mom has loved it her whole life (the first Broadway show she ever saw was Carnival in the early 1960s), and she instilled that love in me. She took me to my first Broadway show, Peter Pan starring Sandy Duncan, when I was a little kid. (Clap for Tinkerbell!) I started performing in shows in elementary school, and I continued doing it all through high school and into my first year of college.

But Sondheim was never really on my radar.

I do remember that one night in 1987 or 1988 my parents went into the city to see the original production of Into the Woods. I remember them telling me that the first act was amazing, and that they wondered, what is there even left to happen in the second act? And then that second act was something crazy.

In high school I listened to the cast album of West Side Story all the time. As a teenager I saw Tyne Daly perform in Gypsy, and that album joined the rotation. But I associated West Side with Leonard Bernstein, and Gypsy I didn’t really associate with anyone. I wasn’t a deep thinker about musical theater. I just enjoyed the music.

I did listen to my parents’ copy of Into the Woods every so often and thought it was brilliant.

And in high school I got to see another high school’s theater group do a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – with all the music taken out. I didn’t know the show, but it made for a hilarious one-act play. And it was obviously a blatant rights violation, but this was Japan before the World Wide Web so it was easier to get away with things like that.

And then I went to college and tried out for a production of Sweeney Todd. It was produced by a group called First-Year Players, which put on shows cast entirely with first-year students as a way to ease them into the UVA drama program. I knew nothing about Sweeney Todd. In high school we’d done Annie Get Your Gun, Anything Goes, and The Music Man. Good old-fashioned musicals.

I had never heard anything like the music in Sweeney Todd. I don’t think many of us had. (I remember two different women auditioned using the same song from Les Miz.) I got cast in the chorus and I remember thinking, what the fuck even is this show and how the hell am I going to learn any of this music? But I did. And I came to love it. It was brilliant. The following summer I bought the original cast recording and was so happy to have the music.

And yet despite loving Sweeney, I still didn’t know anything about Stephen Sondheim. I guess I knew that he’d written the show, but I wasn’t interested in learning anything about him or exploring any of his other musicals. After my first year of college, after not getting cast in any university-wide shows, I mostly turned away from theater and toward choral music and a cappella groups. My big thing for the rest of college became singing. From that point on, theater remained an interest, but only an occasional one.

I saw Nathan Lane perform in Forum on Broadway. But again – I had no interest in exploring further.

In 1996 or 1997 I got really into Rent. I bought the cast album and became obsessed.

In “La Vie Bohème” there’s that line:

to Sontag, to Sondheim, to anything taboo

Again – despite having performed in a Sondheim show – I didn’t really know who Sondheim was. When I heard that lyric I associated his name vaguely with opera or ballet or some highbrow New York City art form. Someone sort of like Leonard Bernstein maybe? Leonard Bernstein, whose biography I had read and whom, as a classical music fan, I was genuinely fascinated by?

I look back at myself now and think, come on, Jeff!

I saw the 2002 revival of Into the Woods with my mom.

That was about the extent of my Sondheim knowledge.

But then eventually I met Matt, and we started dating. I was almost 30. (“I was younger then…”)

Matt was a walking musical theater encyclopedia, and his enthusiasm was infectious. After we’d been dating for a couple of months, he was about to go visit his parents for the holidays, but before he left, he burned three data CDs’ worth of his favorite cast albums and gave them to me. There were several dozen albums there – well-known and obscure.

And from Matt I learned how great Sondheim was. I decided to read Meryle Secrest’s Sondheim biography. I started to get to know Sondheim’s shows.

Eventually I was lucky enough to see productions of all of them – even Saturday Night (and in the case of some shows, multiple productions) – except for one: A Little Night Music. I know some of the songs, but I’ve never seen a production and I’m not too familiar with the plot. Somehow I never got around to seeing the Broadway revival that ran for more than a year in 2010. Why why why?

Matt and I used lyrics from “Being Alive” in our wedding vows.

We got to see him in person a couple of times over the years. The best was when we saw a preview of his musical Road Show at the Public Theater about a decade ago and he sat right behind us. After the show, he started to walk out through a side entrance that led backstage and an usher yelled at him. “Excuse me! Sir! You can’t go that way!” Someone told the usher who he was and a bunch of people around us laughed.

We also got to see him near us in the audience at Symphony Space watching Anthony de Mare perform reinterpretations of his music for piano.

I knew that someday Sondheim would die. Many times over the years I’ve imagined what Twitter would be like on that day. (It turned out to basically be like what I expected.) When it finally happened it felt inevitable but still shocking, perhaps for its suddenness. He’d given an interview just a few days before.

I don’t have anything profound to say about his music or his work. Others more insightful than me have said it much better than I could.

But I’m sad he’s gone. Never again will I be able to sit in a theater watching a new musical and think “I wonder what Sondheim will think of this?”

I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe he’s looking down at us watching us. But it’s hard to believe in someone not existing, so instead I think of it like this: when someone dies, their soul loses interest in anything or anyone earthly. Their soul forgets who they are and instead is in some inaccessible place, eternally pondering things that are inaccessible to us.

It’s such a gift that we were able to be alive at a time when Stephen Sondheim lived too. It’s hard to imagine, for the first time in our lives, a world without him. But his children – his art – will always be with us.

I’ve been immersed in thoughts and memories of 9/11 this week. Lots of them.

I. Doug

My college friend and hallmate for two years, Doug Ketcham, died on September 11, 2001. He was 27 years old and worked as a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a few floors above where the first plane hit.

As the Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch put it four days later:

Douglas D. Ketcham’s last known phone call was to his parents in Florida.

He was in his Cantor Fitzgerald office on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center when the first plane hit several floors below him.

“He called his mother just after and said there had been a terrible explosion, and to tell them that he loved them,” said his friend, John Riley. “He called from underneath his desk.”

After Ketcham said those words, the connection went dead. No one has heard from him since, and he is missing.

Doug grew up in Midlothian, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond. I met him at the start of my third year at UVA, his second year, when we both moved into a pretty small dorm. Most of us were new to the building that year, and we quickly bonded into a close group.

We all played a lot of cards. There was almost always a game of spades or hearts going on during free moments. And Doug was an excellent card player. His mom had taught him bridge. How many college students knew how to play bridge?

As I wrote on my blog 20 years ago:

Doug liked to have fun. And he could charm the pants off of anyone. And he could fall asleep in almost any situation – on a couch, in a bar, with his hand in a bag of chips.

My friend Doug, who was an awesome card player; my friend Doug, who once broke his leg right before a spring break trip to Ireland; my friend Doug, a terrific schmoozer who had no problem striking up a conversation with the prettiest woman in the room or on the subway, to our constant amusement…

Sometime after college, Doug moved to Manhattan. Eventually, I moved back to the New York area too. I rarely saw Doug, even though I lived just across the river in Jersey City. But if I stepped outside my apartment I could see the twin towers looming large on the other side of the Hudson, and they would make me think of him, because I knew he worked there.

Two weeks after 9/11, I went to Doug’s memorial service in Richmond, and afterwards I wrote this:

Doug shouldn’t be dead. It makes no sense. He wasn’t supposed to die like this, so young, and under such ridiculous circumstances. We were sitting in the church, and the music began and the family walked in, first his parents (his mother was sobbing, and I lost it at that point), and then his sister, and his grandparents, and then his girlfriend – escorted by his roommate – and for a second I imagined that it was a wedding and Doug was marrying his girlfriend. And then I thought, Doug’s never going to have a wedding now.

To get to Richmond for the service, I had to rent a car. I remember calling the rental car company – a national chain – and saying that I lived in New Jersey. The woman on the phone said, with sadness in her voice, “We’re all thinking about all of you up there in the New York area.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was renting the car so I could drive down to the memorial service of my friend who had died in the attacks.

For three and a half months from 9/11 through the end of 2001, the New York Times published capsule profiles of everyone who had died that day. Their profile of Doug, in a very eerie coincidence, ran on the same weekend that many of our gang gathered for the wedding of another friend from our group.

Here’s an excerpt:

Mr. Ketcham was remarkably close to his mother. He would call her, even at 2 a.m., if he had just spotted a celebrity, and even told her about his love life.

She had an uncanny knack for sensing, long distance, when he was feeling down. “He told me stuff,” Mrs. Ketcham said from her home near Orlando, Fla. “I’d say, ‘Son, remember, I’m your mother. I’m not old enough to know that.'”

In her son’s briefcase, Mrs. Ketcham found an envelope on which he had scrawled an itinerary for a visit to New York that she had planned but postponed. “I was going to be taken everywhere,” Mrs. Ketcham said. “I was going to be the queen of New York.”

When I read that amazing Atlantic article about Bobby McIlvane last month, it hit home, because Bobby was about the same age as Doug and me.

Here’s something else I wrote:

You graduate from college and so many of your friends go to work for consulting firms and investment banks and brokerages with these prestigious names. You send out resumés and go on interviews and get hired. You expect to make a great salary and get valuable work experience and start to build a terrific life. You’re young and you’re living in New York City. You go to work and you compile spreadsheets and have meetings and write on whiteboards and talk on the phone and meet with clients and send money to your college alumni associations. When you get a chance, you go out to bars in Tribeca with your coworkers and you hit on people and you talk about where you went to school.

You’re not supposed to be trapped inside a 110-story building that’s rapidly filling up with smoke and jet fuel from a hijacked airplane.

I’ve thought about Doug over the last twenty years. He’s eternally 27 years old in my mind. He never got to grow older than that. I still can’t believe he’s not alive. It’s always been hard for me to reconcile my college memories of Doug – totally ordinary memories that we all have of our friends – with the fact that he died in a geopolitical terrorist attack.

My friend died in a terrorist attack? I mean, really?

After twenty years it still feels absurd.

(I’m tangentially connected to two other people who died that day. My parents knew Howard Kestenbaum, who lived in my hometown of Montclair; incidentally, he comes right before my friend Doug Ketcham in the alphabetical listings of the victims. Scott Johnson was the younger brother of someone I went to elementary school with, and my brother knows his sister.)

II. My 9/11

I wasn’t supposed to be in Manhattan that day.

I was still living in Jersey City. But I was at the beginning of a two-week break before starting a new job, and I’d met someone on gay.com the night before, and I’d taken the PATH train into the city to meet him in the Village and stayed overnight with him. On the morning of 9/11, I didn’t even know what had happened until about 10:50, when I left his apartment and walked down West 10th Street to Sixth Avenue and saw everyone staring southward. There was just a wall of smoke at the southern end of Manhattan. I asked one woman what had happened and she paused for a moment like I was stupid. Then she told me.

So I’ve always felt like I was one of the last people in the country to know about 9/11. It seems like most people experienced the horrors of the morning in real time, but for me, it happened all at once, a fait accompli. To this day I’m not really sure how I processed it. I’ve watched the archival TV footage many times since then, and sometimes I’ve forgotten that that’s not how I originally experienced it. (There are lots of times when I wish I had experienced it the same way everyone else did. I feel a little left out, somehow.)

I wound up going back to the guy’s apartment – by which time he had learned about what had happened too – and we walked around together all that day, both in shock, down to lower Manhattan and then across the Brookyn Bridge with the throng, turning back to look at the long jet-black stream of smoke, and then back to Manhattan via subway. He had just moved to New York a week earlier.

He spent the afternoon with me as I realized I had Doug’s phone number and called Doug’s roommate and learned that nobody had heard from Doug since he’d called his mom and girlfriend from the towers that morning.

After that day I never saw my 9/11 companion again, but several months later I found a blog post from him – in which he wrote that he’d narrowly escaped from the World Trade Center that morning.

Huh?

I didn’t contact him. And eventually I lost his contact info and couldn’t completely remember his last name. I don’t know what became of him.

When I finally got home that night, I wrote an epic blog post about everything that had happened that day. I wanted to get it all down. (I rambled too much at the beginning, with the really long prelude about how the World Trade Center figured in my day-to-day life, but I wanted to get everything down.) I primarily considered myself part of the gay blogging community. Blogging was only just about to go mainstream (helped by 9/11, in fact), and there was no social media, but my blog post got read by lots of people, as did anything written by anyone who was in New York that day. (It got included in a Slate.com recap five years later.)

I am deeply glad I was blogging back then. I recently went back and re-read lots of what I wrote that month, not just that day but in subsequent days and weeks. I read some of it for the first time in years. I’d forgotten a lot of it.

Sometimes I think about how, if I’d stayed home in Jersey City the night before, my 9/11 would have turned out totally different. I usually slept with the ringer on my telephone turned off, so I would have missed the frantic voicemails my mom left me that morning. And I didn’t usually watch much TV. But I lived on a busy street that, if you were on it, you could see the Twin Towers. I couldn’t see them from inside my apartment. But I probably would have heard people screaming on the street as they watched what was happening, so I probably would have gone outside and seen it too.

I’m actually glad I was in Manhattan that day. It’s where I would have wanted to be. And I’m glad I didn’t have to spend the day alone.

Nine days after 9/11, I saw “The Producers.” Nathan Lane was out, but it didn’t matter. I needed to laugh. It was cathartic being in that audience.

At the end of the month, I got a cell phone. If you didn’t already have one on 9/11, you soon got one, because it might save your life.

During the holiday season I was lucky enough to be able to attend an event at the Rainbow Room at the top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza on the night of the Christmas tree lighting – but from the top of the building I could see all the way to the southern end of Manhattan and the white glow of Ground Zero, where workers continued to sort through the rubble almost three months after the attacks.

III. Time

I think a lot about time. I always have. How we perceive it and its passage, how our perceptions of it change, how it tricks us.

9/11 feels like an event that exists outside of time. It’s the only event that, when the anniversary comes around, I snap back to that day like there’s a rubber band attached to it on the calendar. It’s like I physically left part of myself there and I have to revisit it once a year. I don’t feel this way about any other event. Is that how the older generation feels about JFK’s assassination? That suddenly the intervening years disappear?

Tied up with this for me is a personal issue – that everything that has happened to me since I graduated from law school in 1999 and came back up north feels like a blur. Is that just a part of getting older? Does time just move more quickly as you get older, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it?

I don’t know.

But some years, when early September arrives, time collapses.

I live in a neighborhood with a lot of college students and it blows my mind that on 9/11, most of them didn’t even exist.

In recent days I’ve looked up coverage of past 9/11 commemorations: the first anniversary, the fifth anniversary, the tenth anniversary. It felt weird to read about. Wait, so we already experienced the tenth anniversary of 9/11? And that anniversary was ten years ago? How is that possible?

III½.

And now for something meta and bizarre.

I’ve written this blog post over the course of several days. When it was practically done, I thought to myself, hmm, did I write anything about 9/11 on the tenth anniversary?

It turns out that I did.

Not only that, but I wrote some of the exact same things ten years ago as I’ve written in this post. And I started my narrative almost the exact same way:

I wasn’t supposed to be in New York that morning.

God, I am so predictable. How could I have used almost the exact same words? And then forgotten that I’d written them?

Echoes of echoes, flashbacks of flashbacks, infinite mirrors facing each other.

Stories solidify in our minds, I guess.

The 25th anniversary, the 50th (should I live that long), and onward – the rubber band will get longer, but I think it will always pull me back.

IV.

While doing research for this post this week, I learned that Doug’s mother died in October 2012.

Nine years ago and I didn’t even know.

The news hit me in the gut. It took me a while to figure out exactly why.

I didn’t know her. But over the years, especially after seeing her at Doug’s memorial service in 2001, I’d sometimes imagine her continuing on with her life, always carrying that grief for her son. And it made me feel connected to her.

I also found an article from the May 3, 2011, Richmond Times-Dispatch, right after bin Laden was killed:

For nearly 10 years, Raenell Ketcham has been mourning the death of her only son, Doug, a Chesterfield County native who died in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, disappearing without a trace after calling his parents from under his desk in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices on the 104th floor.

On Sunday night, a wave of relief washed over his mother as she learned that U.S. forces had killed bin Laden in Pakistan.

“I will never forgive (bin Laden), but it will help to bring closure,” said Ketcham, who lived in the Richmond area for 25 years. “The guy had to pay for what he had done.”

After spending more than a year in bed after visiting ground zero two days after the attack to provide DNA, she has tried to move on with her life, enjoying her retirement in Florida with her husband, Dennis, establishing a scholarship in her son’s name at his alma mater, Midlothian High School, and now paying for children to go to the camp where Doug had worked.

She hopes bin Laden’s death will enable her to make even more progress. “Maybe now I can start to put it behind me,” she said.

. . .

She died a year and a half later.

What happens to someone’s grief when they die?

I realized that when Doug’s mom died, her grief finally ended. I had felt connected to her and her grief for years, and they’re both gone.

It makes me sad. But I’m glad that she’s at peace.

I’ve been on a Twitter break for the past two and a half weeks.

A couple of Sundays ago I decided to avoid Twitter for the day. I just needed a break from the constant news misery. One day became two days, which became three days, and now it’s been 18 days. I’ve tweeted a couple of times, and I’ve looked at a couple of non-news-related Twitter accounts once or twice, but I have not actually checked my feed since that Sunday.

I’ve still been following the news, but only by going directly to particular newspaper websites, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and occasionally a news magazine site or two. I’ve basically turned the clock back on my information consumption about ten years.

I don’t miss the constant updates and anger and doomsaying about every news event large and small, and you-know-who’s looming presence over everything.

I do kind of miss seeing friends’ updates on what they’ve been up to and having jokey Twitter exchanges with acquaintances – the things that pass for being social on Twitter.

I will see how long this lasts. Even though I miss some things, I’m afraid to re-engage with the blue bird, because it has an addictive quality that I find I want to avoid. For now, it’s nice being away from it.