Tommy is a fantastic musical based off the album by The Who. We saw it for the first time in 1995 during our honeymoon in New York. Being huge musical theater fans, we purposely planned to take our honeymoon 2 months after our actual wedding so that our trip would coincide with the national tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. We filled in the trip with several other shows including Tommy.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t interested in seeing it because I wasn’t a fan of The Who and didn’t even know what Tommy was. A friend recommended it highly so we added it to our itinerary.

It was fucking amazing! I was hooked by the end of the opening scene. It was psychedelic at times and the Acid Queen freaked me out but it was absolutely mesmerizing.

It’s a glimpse into the journey of a boy who deals with a traumatic experience by withdrawing into himself to cope. Along the way, he is faced with even more horrific encounters but seemingly does not react because of the impenetrable shield he has built around himself.

He reacts only to pinball and his own reflection. His parents, family, and doctors try everything to reach him to no avail. He will only play pinball or stand in front of the mirror seeing who knows what. I’ve always wondered what drew him to the mirror. He’d just stand in front of it so I didn’t know what comfort he found from it. Lazily, I surmised that it was simply a cool artistic choice.

His mom, finally fed up, releases him from his silent, blind, and deaf world when she smashes his mirror.

It means something to me now.

Like Narcissus who drowned by staring at his own beautiful (idealized) reflection, Tommy was seeing who he was before he was molested and brutalized. He was seeing his perfect self. Because the atrocities were continuing in real life, he always went back to the illusion that the mirror offered him.

Unlike Narcissus, Tommy’s spell was broken before it was too late. The smashing of the mirror breaks the spell, forcing him out of his imaginary, nonexistent world. In the play, Tommy finds peace and happiness in his real life, imperfect though it was. Narcissus, too consumed by his own vanity and beauty, could not pull himself away from his own reflection and died because of it.

That isn’t just Greek mythology. People lose themselves in real life. More and more, the mirrors are disguised to look like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. None of these reflect the truth anymore. Everyone is hiding behind a persona or a photo filter and shares it as if it’s accurate. People get to see only what they want to see and they certainly reflect only what they allow.

We could all use a moment to walk away from the mirror — to learn what is real and what is an illusion — to recognize what has value and what is meaningless. Life is not all pretty or ideal, but it’s more real than what we see in the mirror. And, isn’t that worth something? Anything?