Saturday Good Reads: Mario Frangoulis

In October, my wife and I had tickets to see Mario Frangoulis in concert in St. Louis. He’s the singer whose song “Luna Rosa” inspired the idea that eventually became Dancing Priest. We had seen him in concert a few years ago; we learned about the October concert about two weeks before the performance. There was one potential snag that might make us miss the concert, but it generally looked like a go. The night before, however, the snag snagged, and we had to miss it.

Amazingly, the concert was recorded for the HEC, and then posted to YouTube. My wife found it on Wednesday. It’s 127 minutes long, and I’ve now watched it all. It’s here if you’re interested.

"Dancing Priest:" The Inspiration

The idea for my soon-to-be published novel Dancing Priest came from a song I heard on an airplane.

In October 2002, I was flying from St. Louis to San Francisco to attend the annual meeting of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). I was more than an attendee; I was also an official delegate to the PRSA Assembly, which met the day before the annual meeting began. So I would have been flying on a Friday; the assembly met on Saturday.

I don’t recall what the in-flight movie was, but whatever it was, I didn’t watch it. Instead, I flipped through the various music channels, until I happened upon this incredible tenor voice singing.

The voice belonged to the Greek singer Mario Frangoulis. I hadn’t heard of him before but I listened as the host of the program interviewed him in between songs. He sang in multiple languages – Greek, Italian, English, French and Spanish (he’s also fluent in all five languages). I was amazed at the quality of his voice and his multilingual singing ability. The program was a promotion of his recently released album “Sometimes I Dream.”

At some point in the musical program, Frangoulis sang “Luna Rossa,” or “Red Moon.” Here is the song as he sang it at a concert in Thessalonika in Greece, which I am fairly certain is the version I heard on the airplane:

The song evoked an image in my mind: a priest dancing on a beach. And it wasn’t a Catholic priest, but an Episcopal or Anglican priest. He wasn't dancing by himself but with others, possibly part of a tour group.

The in-flight program ended, but the music kept playing through my head. The album included several other songs that would later become important. It also had “Buongiorno Principessa” from the movie Life is Beautiful and “Nights in White Satin” sung with Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues (a stunning version of the song).

When we landed in San Francisco, I made my way to my downtown hotel and then went looking for a music store. I found a Border’s Bookstore nearby and rode the escalator to the music department on the fourth floor. Just as escalator arrived on the floor, straight ahead of me I saw a large display for the Frangoulis CD. I bought the CD.

I have likely listened to the CD no fewer than 250 times. Every time I heard “Luna Rossa,” the image of the priest dancing on the beach came back. I couldn’t shake the image. And then one day, the image “progressed,” as it were. The priest and the people he was traveling with, including a young American woman, walked from the beach into a restaurant for dinner. At that moment, the idea of a novel was born.

Several songs on the CD helped to frame the novel. The title song, “Sometimes I Dream,” is the song I had in my mind as the music for a very early scene I still refer to as “The Last Tango in Edinburgh.”

But while the idea of the novel was born and began to take shape, I would not put pen to paper (or words to computer screen, to be more exact) for three more years.

Writing, Music and Airplanes to San Francisco

I was on a plane from St. Louis to San Francisco, to attend a conference. It was a Friday, if I recall correctly, in mid-October of 2002. I checked the in-flight music listings, and was skimming through the selections when I heard a voice that stopped me cold. The voice belonged to Greek tenor Mario Frangoulis, and it was unbelievably beautiful.

I was staying in downtown San Francisco, and on my way to Kan’s Chinese restaurant in Chinatown (yes, I’d eaten there before) I stopped at a Border’s on the off-chance they might have the CD I had listened to on the plane. The CD section was on the top floor, and as the escalator deposited me there I was immediately confronted with a store display for – I am not making this up – the very same CD by Mario Frangoulis I had listened to on the plane. (Since then, my wife and I have gotten to hear him live in concert at the Sheldon Theater in St. Louis – and he is just as good live as he is recorded.)

The CD, entitled “Sometimes I Dream,” includes “Nights in White Satin” (sung with Justin Hayward) and “Buongiorno Principessa,” the film score for the movie “Life is Beautiful” which won an Academy Award a few years back for best foreign language film. (I wouldn’t see it when it was first released because it was about the Holocaust, but my wife made me watch it at home one night and I cried like a baby at the wonder of it.)

Another song on the CD is called “Luna Rossa,” and it is a lively, Latin-beat kind of song sung in Italian so I can’t tell you what it’s about except I would guess it’s a love song. But when I first heard it on that airplane ride (and every time I’ve heard it since), for some weird reason it put an image in my head – the image of a priest dancing on a beach at night. The more closely I examined the image, I realized that it was an Episcopal priest who was dancing (how I determined that I’ll never know). And the priest was leading a conga line – on the beach. And a young woman was part of that dancing line.

I didn’t do anything with that image, but it came back every time I listened to the CD. Late one night, lying in bed and unable to sleep, I began to frame a story about the image. Over the next two years, the story grew and changed and morphed and the dancing-on-the-beach bit disappeared and so did Italy. But the story stayed in my head for two full years, until one day I decided to put a small piece of it on paper or, more precisely, on the computer screen. I listened to the CD as I wrote. One day, I looked up, and I had a manuscript. In the meantime, I had bought another of his CDs, and yes, you guessed it, one manuscript had become two, with six very extended “treatments” for related manuscripts behind it.

I’ve alluded to a different manuscript from time to time and even posted a small piece of it on this blog. I’m not using Mario Frangoulis for this one; instead, I’ve been listening to Jim Brickman’s “From the Heart.” Brickman’s music and the words I’ve written have become forever connected in my head, to the point where I can’t think of one without the other. Earlier this year, my wife and I heard Brickman in concert, and when he played the song “Bittersweet” from that CD, I knew exactly which scene it was in my manuscript.

Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life, would not be surprised by any of this. “The conscious use of sound in our writing – like a great sound track in a film – cues the unconscious,” she says. “It brings a host of associations that are more subtly and acutely felt than visual images alone. Sound makes our writing ‘sound’ in the many senses of the word.”

I think I’ve joined the conga line with that priest.


Over at The High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess has been leading Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write. Last week, the discussion was about making it, honesty and vulnerability. Last week’s discussion was about footwork, practice and containment. This week’s discussion is about sound, “writing but” and driving.

Related:

Dancing on Spec by L.L. Barkat at Love Notes to Yahweh.
Writing and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever by Deidra at Jumping Tandem.

Music Everywhere by Nancy Kourmoulis at Treasures of Darkness.

The Real Reason for Highway Rest Stops by Marilyn at As Good A Day As Any.

Sound by Cassandra Frear at Moonboat Cafe.