Walking the Wall

Yes, I’m still greatly enamored of my record player, even though I had to return it once. I adore it, and records for $1 a piece are sure a quick and cheap fix. I am making headway on my quest to replace all the old musicals I adored while growing up. Right now while I write this entry, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I is playing and Deborah Kerr & Yul Brynner are dancing across the room. I particularily adore this musical for many reasons. Chief of which is probably the fated love between Lun Tha and Tuptim whose song "We kiss in a shadow" satisfied that dramatic ache for a love beyond boundaries in a young teenage girls imagination. Later when I read Anna and the King I was amazed to see these characters flesh out into real people who lived and loved and hurt each other and died.

Until I get my Pete’s Dragon (which is winging its way here as we speak), the reigning favorit is Finian’s Rainbow with the wonderful Fred Astaire, lovely Petula Clark, and the most perfect leprechaun turned mortal in Tommy Steele. I loved Fred Astaire, I don’t think he made a musical I didn’t like and this one later in his life (released the year I was born), was the last full musical he made and is great fun. It is interesting how many musicals which, most, would agree are fluff and feathers and fun–do have serious sides. The King and I has human rights and gender issues it addresses, where Finian’s Rainbow deals with unions and racial tensions. But the true joy is found in gem performences like Tommy Steele’s "Something sort of grandish" and "When I’m not near the girl I love" (I love the girl I’m near). He’s one of those small roles that grabs the whole movie. Like the waiter in Easter Parade who makes the imaginary salad and steals the whole scene!

And what is a piece on musicals without The Sound of Music? I think my first Hollywood crush was Christopher Plummer in this movie. I adore "Something Good" and and "Edelweiss" when we see his softer side. I always loved "I have confidence" and it along with the King and I’s "Whistle a happy tune" got me through many scary nights as a kid. I think that music by itself has such a power to tie up into a particular experience that hearing it can bring back a rush of feelings and emotions–add to it the images of a musical and the memories of sliding the big movie reel onto the projector and watching it pop onto the living room wall like magic and the memories lock in place.  Musicals were wild extravegant dreams where lovely people walked up to perfect strangers and started singing in rain drizzled streets (my second love was Peter Lawford in Easter Parade).

I also found Oliver! ("Where is love" is heart wrenching and "Oom-Pah-Pah" was a great favorite I can still sing all the words to…in fact it’s rather scary that most of these albums I can still sing all the words to and yet I don’t know my multiplication tables); and fittingly, Julie Andrews’ Camelot as we are reading Morte d’Artur in Medieval Lit this semester.

Still on my wishlist:

• Easter Parade
• Funny Face
• A Star is Born
• Meet Me in St. Louis
• Brigadoon
• West Side Story

 
And just because I know how silly and nostalgic this whole post is, I’ll smother it in frosting. My husband and I were talking about things our mom’s made when we were younger that still made us salivate. His was REAL, hot off the stove pudding, chocolate and butterscotch, that his mom made and put in fancy little cups with stems on them–warm and gooey with the top layer drying to a film he could pull off and eat. Mine was my mom’s Chocolate Cream Cheese Cupcakes–I was facinated with dropping the spoonfull of cream cheese/sugar filling on top of the cake batter, and then having them come out without anything on top to show it was ever there–until you bite into it the still warm cupcake and get a taste of delicious! Yum! So I made some tonight.