which strictly speaking has nothing to do with 1904 but is important as regards our previous discussion of memory and mystery.



Dominic Cooper and Amanda Seyfried in Universal's Mamma Mia! opening this Friday.

In 1976 when ABBA performed "Dancing Queen" at the wedding reception for the King of Sweden's marriage to Silvia Sommerlath, I was living in Pittsburgh and dancing on weekends at a former speakeasy called the Tilden in East Liberty.  There I fell in love with disco and a coal miner's son from West Virginia.  And then, since music lasts longer than romance, I moved to New York where, for roughly the next ten years, ABBA would provide the soundtrack for many memorable moments in various locations throughout Manhattan while I fell in and out of love, drowned sorrows, danced badly, broke and mended a few hearts, made and lost friends, got high, got wiser, got sad, got older.   One summer in particular, pining away in a sublet on Perry Street, I recall watching people come and go from what I decided was a Socialist Worker's Party headquarters across the way (it turned out to be an AA clubhouse) while I sat in the window drinking cheap wine and singing along to "One of Us."

So call me sentimental, but I was rather carried away by Mamma Mia! which strings together every ABBA song you could ever remember in this absurdly contrived story, performed by a cast you've grown old with -- some of them at any rate.  There was Meryl Streep from Sophie's Choice and 007 Pierce Brosnan and Christine Baranski who played Claus Von Bulow's girlfriend Andrea in Reversal of Fortune and so you watch through a kind of layered, nostalgic fog and realize how all those old familiar friends up there singing and dancing have gotten older.  As for the adorable bride and groom-to-be, well, youth has rarely looked so fresh and appealing and young.

Now I think most people make up mental montages to accompany the music they listen to, even if not all of you day-dream them down to specific dance moves, locations or casting.  Still, it's hard to explain how close and yet how far off the numbers in "Mamma Mia" come to approximating what used to go through my head some thirty years ago, when we actually had turn-tables and vinyl collections and the time to lounge around with cocktails listening and dreaming up our own personal Busby Berkeley routines to "Super Trooper" or ""Knowing Me, Knowing You."  In the film, "Dancing Queen" becomes a feminist pied piper number with Meryl leading all the women of the picturesque village down to the water for a line dance on the dock, to be followed by a bevy of boys in flippers clowning in and out of the water while the young couple sing "Lay All Your Love On Me," and by the time we get to "Voulez Vous" I've already decided I'll need to see this movie again just to pay special attention to members of the chorus.  Then, on the way to the wedding ceremony, held in a tiny Greek church on a perilous promontory overlooking the wine-dark sea at Magic Hour, Meryl sings "The Winner Takes It All" in a dizzying series of close-ups and aerial shots, I found myself wondering where they found room to put the camera and crew.  

None of which was how I would have imagined the songs being played out, once upon a time.  But then I never expected, when I picked up ABBA's Gold Album in 1992, that I'd ever see either a stage or a movie version of these songs.  I never imagined I'd ever be living in L.A. either, or wind up at a screening at the Mann's Chinese in Hollywood at the peak of tourist season.  I never expected living this long.  So I was glad, watching Meryl give these songs everything she's got, that I had.  This lady has played everything from poor Sophie to Ethel Rosenberg in "Angels in America" -- she's really run the gamut of our times, if you know what I mean.

There was always such a heartfelt but naive innocence to ABBA.  You wouldn't think something so light and insubstantial could possibly survive.  So it made me glad to see Meryl having a good time.  She looked happy to have gotten to the other side of it all.  She looked good.  She made me grateful we'd both stuck around this long.  She made me realize that, as big a mystery as life can be sometimes, it isn't over yet.