The Circle in the Square didn’t feel like most Broadway theaters. The stage sat in the middle, the audience wrapped around it, and that night it felt like the old Copacabana.

Christine and I were there for “Just in Time,” the Bobby Darin musical biography, with Jeremy Jordan exceptional at playing Bobby. Great music and dancing. The whole room was in it.

I remembered Bobby Darin’s music well. He was a great entertainer. His recordings were part of my young adult life, from 1959 all the way to 1973. I knew he died young.

But I would have guessed he was in his fifties.

He was 37.

I didn’t know that until that night.

I also didn’t know how he died. He almost died as a child from rheumatic fever.  He survived, but the fever left him with a faulty heart valve. That valve is what finally took him.

Alone in my room at the Edison Hotel after the show, it hit me.  

My dad, Jerome C. Scooler, had rheumatic fever as a child. It left him with a faulty heart valve. He survived one heart attack.

But a few months later, he succumbed to a second.

He was 39 when he died in 1943.

I was four.

Yes, that was way too close to home.

Enuf.