Art is long, life is short; tend to your strangely quiet gardens | MARK HUGHES COBB

What's the flip side of "The Secret Garden" 's "Come spirit/come charm/come days that are warm"?"Come thunder/ rain swell / relieve us from hell"?

Now that I've doomed us all, take shelter from summer swelter. It feels like a curse word, or cursed word: tornado. So seriously, when rain monsoons down like it has two of the past several days, dampening atop previously 107-degree (real feel) weather:

"Close the shutters and lock the doors/brace the windows as in it pours /… checking supplies/watching the skies/fares well the house that's ready."

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That's the prelude to the "strangely quiet" calm during which brothers Archibald and Neville Craven lament how niece Mary reminds them of late Lily, especially about the eyes. Storms threaten home, and life, but also feed rejuvenation. Terror opens space for peace.

The metaphor should be clear, especially if you know Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 novel, from which the Lucy Simon (Carly's sister) and Marsha Norman musical was adapted: Mary Lennox (Daisy Eagan), orphaned by a cholera outbreak in British India, journeys to a gloomy country house in the Yorkshire Moors to live with Uncle Archie (Mandy Patinkin), made endlessly miserable due to the death of beloved Lily (Rebecca Luker), who died giving birth to their sickly son, Colin.

There's a villain (Robert Westenberg) beyond storms, illness and disease, and an overgrown garden, once cared for by Lily, and, gradually, rebirth, redemption, and heroic recovery. Rebecca/Lily appears as a memory, a spirit, a guiding light, a guardian angel. Despite the aching void where she should have been, Lily's never truly gone.

Lightning stings, or so my pal Bebe tells me, while adding "the superpowers are worth it." My obit will read: "Alabama man struck repeatedly by lighting and meteors while cuddling radioactive spider, after suffering extensive gamma ray bath." Subhed: "Criminals shot all his loved ones to death, right in FRONT OF HIM." Superhero, or fly to a higher realm trying.

When I interviewed Rebecca, the Helena native who originated the role of Lily, she voiced what many from down hyar think about chances of rising to another level:

"Being from Alabama, you think 'What am I going to do for a living?' " Luker said. "You don't think 'I'm going to become a Broadway star.'

"You don't think 'I'm going to New York and work in theater.' Or I didn't anyway."

We met at the Neil Simon (Not Carly's sister) Theatre one afternoon in March 2001, hours before she'd go on as Marian in her Tony-, Drama Desk- and Outer Critics Circle-nominated performance, for the 2000 "The Music Man" revival. She also earned top Broadway nominations for Lily, for Magnolia in "Show Boat," for Maria in "The Sound of Music," for Winifred in "Mary Poppins" (another role she originated), and others. Rebecca also performed off-Broadway ("Vagina Monologues," "Brigadoon," "Death Takes a Holiday," etc.), in staged concerts, symphony and solo performances, and on TV ("Boardwalk Empire," "The Good Wife," etc.) and film (including David "Sopranos" Chase's 2012 "Not Fade Away").

I've got four of her solo discs in the car, including Jerome Kern and Cole Porter samplers, and her pops record "Leaving Home," where she sings the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Billy Joel, and others, including one song each from the sisters Simon. Rebecca said that, despite her long pro musical career — begun on Broadway as understudy to Sarah Brightman, the original Christine in "The Phantom of the Opera," then taking the leading role from 1989 until Lily rose in 1991 — she was really a rock/pop kid, especially the music of her '70s childhood.

If you haven't heard Rebecca before, lucky you. YouTube's your friend; go, see and hear. Among the many you'll find is this last public performance, when her voice was failing, but still unmistakable; she's supported by Julie Andrews, Kaite Couric, Alan Cumming, Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Laura Osnes, George Dvorsky (a dear friend of Luker's, who you could have seen on stage here in 2016, in "The Countess of Storyville"), Jason Robert Brown, John Kander, Richard Kind, Nathan Lane, Joel Grey, Susan Stroman, Adam Pascal, Andrea Martin, Bob Saget, Leslie Odom Jr. and many more. While shared, it raised a couple hundred thousand dollars for Project ALS.

More: "At Home with Rebecca Luker"

Never got a chance to see that "Secret Garden," but I've played that cast album so many times, it feels like I did. First heard it while preparing to interview Rebecca, a University of Montevallo music grad, a kid who'd sung in her church choir, played in the Thompson High marching band, 10 years after that show.

Paul K. "Hey Babes" Looney and I were ushered in a dingy stage door from which you could barely see glowing promos for "Music Man," starring Craig Bierko in his Broadway debut, and up a narrow staircase in near-darkness.

You'd never guess Rebecca was a big-damn star, up in lights. She welcomed us into her home-style (Cozy, decorated with photos, throws and other personal stuff) room, then after an hour talking, shooting photos, took us out on stage, to show the treadmill where she'd seem to be walking briskly away ― Backwards and forwards, which come on, WHILE you're talking and singing? I can barely talk and hold a guitar ― from Bierko, as he juked around.

So yes, hours after landing at LaGuardia in the Bigsnapple, I was on a Broadway stage, starring with a ghost light, Paul K., and Rebecca Freaking Luker.

That night, I cried in a theater for the first time. I don't even LIKE "The Music Man" ... but that's not why. Tears of joy. Cognition of pure, unadulterated beauty. Good (supernatural being of choice), Rebecca's voice. Silvery, crystalline, pure as sunlight on a mountain lake. It tattered me and tethered me (stealing from Colin Meloy), in fifth-row aisle house seats, thanks again to Rebecca.

"Goodnight, My Someone," "Will I Ever Tell You," the "'Til There Was You" duet, all lovely, but … those final notes of "My White Knight."

And now I'm tearing up for probably the 400th time in front of a laptop. Live long enough, and you'll type too many tributes and obituaries, too many memorials and reveries, too many sermons and eulogies.

In the otherwise not-much-missed "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" ran this poignant line:

"We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away."

Later in 2001 Rebecca took a break from Marian to travel to Tuscaloosa, and Shelton State, to be inducted into the Alabama Stage and Screen Hall of Fame. Humble, reserved, appreciative.

I stayed in loose touch, the occasional message, because despite her easygoing nature, I've always hated the idea of being one of those pesky journos who abuses connections, which is why I still won't share Sela Ward's cell, and honestly haven't dialed it except that once.

As Paul K noted, it's a testament to how down-home Rebecca remained that she even saw visitors in her dressing room before a starring performance, much less let us hang out, conduct a full interview, then walk out on her stage.

Hard to believe she's been gone almost three years. What a gorgeous voice and spirit.

Gone is relative, of course. From Terry Pratchett's "Reaper Man": “No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”

More: "All I Ask of You" featuring Rebecca Luker and Hugh Panaro

When the Oscar-, BAFTA- and Grammy-winning actor/composer/musician Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March, tributes mentioned his fondness for the Latin "Ars longa, vita brevis," which you may be forgiven for assuming means "art is long, life is short," in part because that's what it means. Roughly. It's originally from Greek, the physician Hippocrates, and you know the Telephone game, but it originally meant skill ― or craft, technique ― requires time, something we can't get possibly have enough of. A longer version: "Life is short, and art long; opportunity fleeting, experimentation perilous, and judgment difficult."

On those tubes of You, there's a clip from the 1991 Tonys, showing Mary, Archie, Neville, Dickon (John Cameron Mitchell), and finally, Rebecca. It's introduced by no less than Julie Andrews; Rebecca was still several years away from stepping into her shoes as the problem named Maria.

It closes with an angelic Lily urging Mary to rebuild family, to revive Colin, via the garden: "Come to the garden/nestled in the hills/there I'll keep you safe beside me ...."

It's tougher to watch now, knowing that, like ethereal and longed-for Lily, she's no longer present, at least on this plane, struck down by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in December 2020; just 59. Kristin Chenoweth, Laura Benanti, Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and numerous other fellow stars, friends, publicly mourned. Boggess, who played Christine a few times, said "Her 'Think of Me' is still untouchable."

More: Excerpts from "The Secret Garden" on the 1991 Tony Awards.

Had Broadway not been already dark due to COVID — Rebecca's husband Danny Burstein was hit with a serious case while caring for Rebecca, who was gradually losing control over her body, to the point she not only couldn't sing, but could barely speak — the lights would have dimmed.

But here's a present: Her eternal voice; her effortless warmth; her timeless, radiant beauty. Art is long.

Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: What lives on beyond the span of an existence: Art | MARK HUGHES COBB