A Toast To Frank
By Mahnuel Muñoz
“I hope they live a hundred years, and that the last voice they hear is mine.”
This is Frank Sinatra’s classic toast to his audience during his concerts.
I often look into infinity and return it:
“That’s done, old friend.”
Whenever I can I listen to him or sing to him. You never know when the curtain is going to fall. And the toasts must be fulfilled.
A sip of Jack Daniels for the music, another for our girls and another for the road.
Sinatra would have wanted to live to be a hundred or a thousand years old. He said that you had to want to live, hell… Dying is a pain.
Yes, Frank. Live. To see what happens after another new dawn. Live if only to bother cowards.
Frank disappeared without asking permission or forgiveness on May 14, 1998, after turning the world upside down; love, drink, sing, dance, listen, fantasize, enjoy, flee, idealize, play, cry, lie, need, forget, forgive, want, laugh, sigh, tremble, unite, LIVE… nothing was the same after his step. Thus, one can say goodbye however they want. Or not say goodbye.
Good old Dean Martin said this was Frank’s world and we were just living in it.
I, of course, am registered in his council. His songs have been and are vital and intellectual cartography for me, and are embedded as naturally in my bones and my circumstances as the soundtrack of a musical; when the world judges me for my oddities, “Why Try To Change Me Now?” starts playing; when joy spills between the seams I hear “Something’s Gotta Give”; When love overwhelms me (which is almost always) a medley of clouds and clearing is unleashed that includes everything from “All The Way” to “Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart”, passing through “Forget To Remember” or “Last Night When We “Were Young.”
His songs take care of me, heal me and burn me; They save me, guide me and contaminate me… they put a capital L in my life.
Today is not more important to me than any other because I always celebrate Sinatra’s work and life with the same joy.
“One hundred” is nothing more than a number with too many zeros, a figure dressed up to sell souvenirs at a high price.
But today, like yesterday, or like twenty-six years ago, when Frank got under my skin at my sister Carmen’s house, is a good day to raise my glass and toast, proudly and loudly, with some phrases taken from the old blue eyes’ songbook:
“I’m going to live until I die, and when the one with the scythe comes to pull my sleeve, I’ll be singing as I leave”
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