Monday, August 31, 2009

Are we all Jekyll and Hyde

I went to see my step-daughter, Micah, in the musical Jekyll and Hyde. It was playing at a small community theatre in Little Rock, AR. The cast was wonderful and the vocals were astonishing. As I sat there and listened to the songs being emotionally sung, I wondered, are we all Jekyll's and Hyde's? I cannot imagine that any of us are either or. But as the play progressed I began to be reminded that all of us are both. The first scene opens with Dr. Jekyll visiting his father in a sanatorium where he was placed because he went "mad". Dr. Jekyll vowed to his father to find a way to take the madness away and put it somewhere else, to separate the good and bad. Further into the play I began to realize also the basic meaning behind the thought process of the writer. We are all good and we are all evil. Many of us spend a lifetime trying to separate the two. How many of us spend a great deal of time trying to obliterate the evil? How many of us truly believe this can be done? How guilty do we feel when it doesn't happen and even worse when evil takes over? More later.