'West Side Story'

As 2010 floats away making room for 2011, I opine about one of the greatest accomplishments in American art. That being West Side Story.

I'm prejudiced. I like West Side Story. My mother for years has gotten season passes to Fair Park's Dallas Summer Musicals. As a teenager, she took me to see West Side Story. At the time, I had little interest in anything other than girls and rock and roll.

Still, I'd read Romeo and Juliet my freshman year of high school and I was pretty high and might. I was disappointed that West Side Story was just a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet. Or, moreso, I was disappointed that they didn't even try to hide it.

I brushed off West Side Story for this reason. Looking back, that's silly. West Side Story is better because it takes Romeo and Juliet's basic structure and adds a series of wrinkles including the use of jazz, the setting of 1950s New York City, a mecca of art, culture, growth and a seedy subculture fed by the beats and jazz generation.

It's also post-war America. These rough-and-tumble kids remember Pearl Harbor and the years between 1941 and 1945 when their friends, neighbors and family members were shedding their blood. This was a time for America to mature. As it aged, the middle class grew, the upper class got crustier and both left the lower class.

That's where we find the Sharks and Jets. One, grandsons of immigrants, who all worked blue-collar jobs seeing their position in life, as a lower rung, being challenged by the new wave of immigrants from Latin America. It was not only about jobs or housing. But a certain pride of being the backbone of this country. A certain pride in being the doormat of the higher classes.

In actuality, these two groups had bigger gripes on the rich. It wasn't the Puerto Ricans driving wages down or forcing these people to live in tenements. And the Puerto Ricans probably didn't know who to fight other than the person in front of them throwing punches.

This is one of the top 10 most significant works that America has put out. Should they unfreeze my head in 2120 and ask me what Americans got right, I would point to West Side Story first.