![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I had an aunt who loved a plant, but you're my cup of tea
I was made aware earlier this evening that the current administration issued a proclamation on the 850th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Becket celebrating his martyrdom in the cause of religious liberty with all the anti-abortion bullhorns and Christian hegemony to be expected from this dominionist crowd.
I prefer to remember that in high school I watched Becket (1964) with the friend who made my brain turn to lemon pudding with just the smell of her hair and that spring we lay freezing beside one another in a hastily pitched pup tent on the track field because the temperature had plunged below zero during a twenty-four-hour charity relay and despite what years later transpired to have been an extremely mutual interest we still didn't end up making out because neither of us had the gaydar God gave a rock to turn over in the dark and say, I'm cold, Thomas. I can still hear it in her voice. We'd quoted it all winter. A rock.
We wrote our first animal song about fifteen years ago, I suppose. We've written a great many more in the interim, which we find a very good place to work. We have recently embodied all these songs about animals in a new LP called The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann for Parlophone—BMC1164, actually. Very easy number to remember if you think of it as a date, 1164 being of course the date of the Constitutions of Clarendon at the time of Thomas à Becket, marking a very important stage in the quarrel between Anouilh and Christopher Fry.
—Michael Flanders and Donald Swann at the Haymarket Theatre, 18 October 1963
I prefer to remember that in high school I watched Becket (1964) with the friend who made my brain turn to lemon pudding with just the smell of her hair and that spring we lay freezing beside one another in a hastily pitched pup tent on the track field because the temperature had plunged below zero during a twenty-four-hour charity relay and despite what years later transpired to have been an extremely mutual interest we still didn't end up making out because neither of us had the gaydar God gave a rock to turn over in the dark and say, I'm cold, Thomas. I can still hear it in her voice. We'd quoted it all winter. A rock.
We wrote our first animal song about fifteen years ago, I suppose. We've written a great many more in the interim, which we find a very good place to work. We have recently embodied all these songs about animals in a new LP called The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann for Parlophone—BMC1164, actually. Very easy number to remember if you think of it as a date, 1164 being of course the date of the Constitutions of Clarendon at the time of Thomas à Becket, marking a very important stage in the quarrel between Anouilh and Christopher Fry.
—Michael Flanders and Donald Swann at the Haymarket Theatre, 18 October 1963
no subject
I managed to get that lesson by osmosis instead of direct experience, by watching Janni (before we started dating) go through it. This was the same boyfriend who taught me that deliberately staged snits do not make the intended audience feel sympathy, but sad laughter.
no subject
It contains all the usual suspects and then a wealth of rarities, including some fantastically early stuff performed by the people it was written for, e.g. Max Adrian narrating a "Guide to Britten" which is completely unfair and really funny. Swann does a terrible American accent for the McCarthyist satire of "Brave New Worldling." Also a lot of the variant introductions from the live recordings are amazing. "Now there's a tune you must know, 'Greensleeves.' Even Donald Swann knows it. As a matter of fact, he doesn't like it very much. He says it always reminds him of an afternoon he spent in Christchurch Meadow. It was Swann-Upping Sunday."
This was the same boyfriend who taught me that deliberately staged snits do not make the intended audience feel sympathy, but sad laughter.
Oh, dear.
It was my first time dating anybody. It was a learning experience. At least I got it out of the way in high school, instead of marriage.
no subject