How Olivia Newton-John Saved My Life — Again

I am currently on the longest vacation of my life, seventeen days. It included a few days in Barcelona and then other delightful spots along the way to a trans-Atlantic cruise to Miami.

Knowing that once the excursions stopped, we’d have nine days of sailing, I packed my Kindle with books both high-brow and low-brow for the long sail across the pond. Somewhere in the mid-brow category might be the celebrity memoir, and I chose Olivia Newton-John’s Don’t Stop Believin’, which she wrote in late 2018 after her final cancer diagnosis. At the time of its writing, she was fully confident and upbeat about her chances of beating the dreaded disease again. (She succumbed to the disease in August 2022, at age 73.)

Since her death, her legacy has only grown, it seems. More songs have been released, posthumously, but, more than that, she died at a time when our country has been in deep polarization. Everybody’s angry. When she passed, whether you were a fan of her music or not, I think there was a collective moment where everybody thought, “Wow, what a breath of fresh air she was.”

I always loved Olivia’s music, both pre- and post-Grease, the latter of which gave her a career renaissance on the charts in the ’80s. But it was more than the music itself. As a young boy, she projected kindness and honesty along with that wholesome beauty. As John Travolta himself said, “Everybody wanted her as a girlfriend,” and that’s why he made a personal visit to convince her to play Sandy.