"The Most Beautiful Adventure"

If you're ever feeling jaded, read a disaster account.  No, I'm serious.  My favorite teacher put it this way: you don't know what an ant colony is all about until it's kicked over.  Reading about tragedies shows you what people are really made of, and it usually doesn't disappoint.

So you think you're having a bad day

Some tragedies get a lot of play in the media, like the sinking of Titanic.  But others, while still familiar, aren't widely depicted.  One such event was the torpedoing of the Lusitania.  A number of famous and important people had the bad luck to be in Allied waters in 1915, one of whom was this man:

Dustin Hoffman, Time Lord.

Charles Frohman, who was played by Dustin Hoffman in Finding Neverland, was the producer of Peter Pan's original run and was an international entertainment mogul.  When the torpedoes struck, he was smoking a cigar on the ship's veranda.

I'd have cast someone a little less Dustin Hoffman-y for the role

According to some accounts, Frohman and millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt spent the remaining minutes of their lives strapping life jackets to infants in the nursery (Vanderbilt was a hero: numerous reports say that Vanderbilt and his valet grabbed children, carrying two at a time to the life boats and distributing life jackets). Rita Jolivet, who survived the sinking, was with Vanderbilt and Frohman just before a "green cliff" of water crashed through the ship.  As they were standing by Lusitania's marble staircase, Frohman calmly quoted a line from his most famous production, still smoking his cigar:

"Why fear death?  It is the most beautiful adventure in life."

We're all spending our lives learning how to be human.  And a situation like this illustrates how to be human at the end of our time on this planet.  Be kind, be calm, and walk boldly into that next beautiful adventure.




I read this story while researching my on-going story Buzzards Over Carson.  Check it out over at Jukepop Serials.
P.S. Frohman's story got a little spooky at the end.