For want of a babysitter...

...a life was found.

There's an old adage:

For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost.

For want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the battle was lost.

Well, sometimes it can go a different way.

Philadelphia, PA 1958 -  My parents wanted to go out one Thursday night. My grandmother, who lived with us, was away and my brother, who is three years older than I, was going to children's choir rehearsal at church. So what to do with Richard?

Why not send him along with his brother to choir rehearsal? He can sit in the back of the room and read his comic books and we can pick up both boys after rehearsal is done. Great idea!

So there I was, not quite 7 years old, sitting in the choir room with all the bigger kids getting ready to start practicing and the choir director, a Mrs. Jackson, hands me a hymnal and asks me to sing with the other kids. I had no trouble reading the words and all the hymns they were singing I had heard before, so I sang.

When my parents came to pick us up, Mrs. Jackson asked them if I could be a permanent member of the children's choir, saying I had a beautiful boy soprano voice that just needed practice to be really good. My parents (and I) agreed and every week I would sing as part of the choir.

Little did any of us know that night that I would go on to being in 6 Broadway musicals and my singing and acting would end up financially supporting my family, paying the mortgage, putting food on the table and enabling both my father and my brother to go to college (and my father to go on to seminary and achieving his life-dream of being a Christian minister).

What might have happened if they could have gotten a babysitter that night?