#73 | I Sing the Body Electric, Still

On Walt Whitman, Fame, ER, Hair, and Humanity?

IYKYK: I’ve always loved the song I Sing the Body Electric from Fame. It’s earnest, over-the-top, and theatrical in all the ways I pretend not to be, but absolutely am.

I sing the body electric
I celebrate the me and to come
I toast to my own reunion
When I become one with the sun

It has been my hype song since the very beginning of my career. The thing I blast when I need to shake off self-doubt or force myself to remember I am, in fact, a full and feeling person  and most often right before I present and need to shake out the shakies (ask me how many times I’ve sat in a corporate bathroom stall with my airpods in just to listen to the first minute of the song pre-presentation - trick question, I’ve lost count). I even almost walked down the aisle to it when I got married but went with Aretha instead.

But, as is appropriate in a Philip Roth Summer, I’ve recently started second guessing if I really and truly understand why it’s helpful, or if it actually even is.

This year has been an absolute manic blur: deadlines, meetings, saying yes to too many things, multiple newsletters (hi), and a constant low-grade panic about AI, the fate of my industry and the ticking time bomb that sits above my hips. I’ve been productive in that desperate, unsustainable way where it feels like if I stop, just for a second, I’ll disappear.

In fact, since the beginning of the year I’ve lost 13 pounds without trying (this doesn’t happen to Eastern European Jews like me who hold onto fat resources JUST IN CASE we have to flee again) so I am kind of disappearing, or becoming more visible, depending on whether you ask science or society.  

So to “relax,” (you know the 1 or 2 hours before bed where I am at my computer but ALSO watching TV),  my husband and I started watching ER from the beginning. We’re in the thick of it now, Season 8 (of like 15?), and the other night we hit an episode called “Secrets and Lies.”

I immediately clocked it as a Breakfast Club episode, because of course The Breakfast Club is LCF canon, though I could never quite figure out if I was Ally Sheedy or Molly Ringwald and refuse, at this point, to choose. Set in a mandatory sexual harassment  seminar for four doctors who got caught joking about a patient’s bag of sex toys and blow up dolls, it’s a wildly on the nose take.  A lot of eye-rolling, sexual tension and eventually, of course, a not-so-surprising amount of emotional bloodletting. 

At one point, Dr. Susan Lewis (my take: brought back from early seasons to revive ratings in a mid series slump ) notices a passage from Walt Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric on the chalkboard (should we bring the chalkboard back? I say yes) and her and Nurse Abby Lockhart bond over the fact that they are aware that there’s a poem, but their real point of reference is the song from Fame. At which point Dr. Lewis starts singing and all of us viewers at home wonder why the editors left it in and oh god it’s still going? 

This is not only beautiful to me because obviously I love this song and I’m sure I sound just as terrible as Dr. Lewis singing it, but because the actor who plays the garbage person Dr. Romano, Paul McCrane, is  one of the featured singers of the song in the final scene of the movie. Gold lamé, arms outstretched, FULL THEATRICAL TRANSCENDENCE.

We all have to grow up I guess?

It was one of those odd little cultural echoes that makes you feel like the universe is tapping you on the shoulder. And you know, dear reader, that I believe that the universe knows exactly when to intervene. 

But this wasn’t the first time my brain had mashed up Whitman, musical theater, and a creeping sense of cosmic wrangling. Growing up, my mom made me watch Hair, yes, the hippie rock musical, yes, probably too early, and two songs from the show have lived rent-free in my head ever since: Hare Krishna (obviously see my biopsy daze thoughts) and The Flesh Failures. 

Really and Especially The Flesh Failures. 

“We starve, look at one another short of breath / Walking proudly in our winter coats / Wearing smells from laboratories / Facing a dying nation…”

That first verse has clung to me for years like casino smoke in old carpet, impossible to air out, immune to febreeze and always lingering in a way that you can almost see.

Honestly, how could it not?

It's impossible to forget. It feels as if it was written yesterday, not in 1967. We’re still walking proudly toward war or extinction in our fast fashion coats, still gasping for air whether from literal wildfires or metaphorical ones. Still facing a nation with its seams constantly coming undone. Aren’t we supposed to learn from the past?

“The rest is silence…

The Rest is Silence…”

That chorus is unsettling by design.

If it felt uncomfortable when I was ten, it feels like prophecy now.

Because here I am decades after having watched Hair for the first time, mainlining caffeine and meetings, playing working woman and board member and newsletter-writer like I’m auditioning for some postmodern remake of How to Succeed in Business Without Really … Dying Inside. All while the world around me spins faster and faster toward automation, optimization. Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (The original Daft Punk version NOT the Kanye version). I feel like I can’t glitch or show emotion. No off days. Just clean lines and consistent output.

I’m not a machine. I’m a person. I glitch. I get tired. My body fails. My mind skips tracks. And no amount of productivity hacks can protect me from the truth that I’m made of flesh and breath and mood swings.

Whitman knew this. That’s what I Sing the Body Electric is really about, not just the beauty of the body, but its reality. Its weight. Its heat. Its stubborn humanness. He wasn’t writing about productivity or what the body did. He was writing about what the body is. What the body is at rest. In stillness.  He was writing about flesh as sacred, about the dignity of mere presence, about honoring the soul by honoring the skin it lives in.

I think this maybe why the Fame version always did something for me. Because under all the spandex and sweat and 80s melodrama, there’s something deeply real and relevant about a bunch of kids shouting into the void: I know who I am. I am more than output. I am here to feel it all.

I was raised on that kind of idealism. Hair told me the world could change, but not without suffering. Fame told me I could be electric and dance on cars on the streets of Manhattan. Whitman told me the body, my body, was a temple, not a productivity tool.

 I think this weird constellation of ER and Fame and Hair and Whitman isn’t just nostalgia. This is a little bit of the universe’s reckoning. A reminder that what makes me valuable isn’t about anything other than how beautifully I can inhabit my own humanity. A body that sings (poorly). A mind that wanders. A voice that rambles. A spirit that gets overwhelmed, and overjoyed and overtired. A being that is deeply and messily alive.

This is the female form,

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,

It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,

I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor,

all falls aside but myself and it, Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,

Everything else, all the rest, is silence.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF