Looking back at parents who helped guide a future critic’s career

I’ve been thinking a lot about my life and career in the last couple of weeks since my father passed away at 98 and a half, and how he and my mother so strongly impacted the direction of my life without attempting to.

I’m not talking about the ways parents influence their children by example, encouragement and support. My parents couldn’t have been better at those things. They were the perfect role models. Together, they helped me appreciate the world around me, want to make it a better place for everyone, and be kind and respectful to others.

While I was growing up with my two older brothers, our dinner conversations were filled with questions and discussions about serious things. We were encouraged to try new experiences and read books that might be different from the ones we knew we liked. Politics was often a topic, but so was what we learned in school on any given day. My brothers reminded me that my father would often give us spelling quizzes after dinner.

Those big-picture ideas provided the background to help me become the person I am today, further shaped by the inadvertent push they gave me toward a career.

They introduced me to the theater, and subtly, if cautiously, encouraged my interest in journalism and my desire to pursue a job as a theater critic, which decades ago seemed something of a pipe dream.

It wasn’t intentional on their part, at least at the start. I grew up in a New Jersey suburb of New York City, and during Christmas week vacation when I was 12, my parents took me and my brothers to see the musical “1776” on Broadway. No one could have predicted how it would change my life.

I had seen a couple of stage shows before, but this was something special. Right in front of me, American history (with songs) came to life in the story of the creation of the Declaration of Independence. And even though we know what happened, the musical makes you question whether the Continental Congress will ever approve the document.

For the next few years, we saw one musical each Christmas break. “The Rothschilds” one year, and a rock musical version of Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” which I did not want to see because my teachers made Shakespeare seem dull. That show was anything but, and led me to a new appreciation of Shakespeare..

It was also the show that led me to discover my future career. Years later, my parents shared a story that I didn’t recall. When they mentioned “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” my oldest brother asked, “What did the critics say?” I asked them, “What’s a critic?” I was 14 at the time. I soon found out that people got paid to go to the theater and write what they thought about the show. That sounded good to me.

Within a short time, I was considered old enough to go into the city with friends and see shows with tickets we’d get at the half-priced TKTS booth. Theater became my major hobby and those trips into New York gave me a special background when I finally got a chance to start writing reviews.

I wrote reviews for my junior and senior high school newspapers. When I started college at American University in Washington, D.C., I signed up to be a features writer and reviewer for the student newspaper The Eagle. I kept reviewing even in my senior year when I served as Editor in Chief. After my father retired, they moved into Manhattan, and we'd spend parts of my vacations standing in line for discounted tickets to new and older shows.

I figured it would be years, if ever before I would get a paid job as a critic, so I wrote as many arts-related features as I could in my first job as an editor and reporter at United Press International in Washington, D.C., where I got to interview lots of actors and directors touring through the city.

When I moved to Sarasota as assistant city editor of the Herald-Tribune, I let my bosses know that I was interested in being a critic someday. It happened sooner than I expected. I was asked by the then-new features editor to do some reviews on my nights off when any of our freelance critics weren’t available.

Before I knew it, I was offered a full-time job as a theater critic and feature writer.

My parents loved that I found a job I was passionate about (even if my father, a child of the Depression, was permanently worried that I’d never make enough money as a journalist to survive).

I was surprised but happy that they decided to retire here and experience all the arts that I was writing about and I know they loved it when they’d meet new people who asked them if they were related to me. (I was equally happy when someone mentioned that they had just met my parents at an event.)

Until COVID hit, they were out generally five nights a week in the season, attending theater, concerts, operas, and more. In their later years, they became donors and co-producers and I enjoyed seeing their names in programs supporting the programs that I was writing about and attending.

I was lucky to have them around for so many years (my mother, a retired teacher, died in 2020), sharing our experiences from different experiences, and just enjoying each other’s company as adult friends, as well as child and parents. They never stopped learning and teaching by example, and I hope I am carrying that on in my own little way.

Follow Jay Handelman on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Contact him at jay.handelman@heraldtribune.com. And please support local journalism by subscribing to the Herald-Tribune.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Parents helped a future critic discover a passion for the arts