Shelley and Byron will be on their way begging for my postal code
For everyone whom I may have scarred with the last installment of Bradford pears, please enjoy some flowering trees from this evening's walk that can be safely, for individual values of pollen, inhaled.
The lilacs are emerging at the top of our street.
I wished these tulips well in their quest to be birds of paradise.
A raft of dogwood holding up the sky.
I miss the brick of our old neighborhood, so I like the one outcropping we have here.
This dogwood cut so beautifully across its house.
This one formed a screen.
Elegantly insectile.
I also miss the poppies of our old neighborhood, so this tulip doing its best impression pleased me.
Haven't a clue what this stuff is except brilliantly colored.
The ornamental cherry went full Maxfield Parrish in the sunset.
I got sick of pastorals.
Thanks to a stray line that got it stuck in my head last night, I became weirdly obsessed with trying to figure out my family's chain of transmission for the folk song variously known as "Army Life" or "Gee, Ma, I Want to Go Home." My grandfather famously got nowhere near the armed forces in World War II on account of being what![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie once succinctly described as blind as half a bat. (He worked the duration of the war in the mill room of the California Ink Company and I wrote a poem about it.) I know it got out into the wild and was recorded by Lead Belly and Pete Seeger and even musicians I didn't grow up listening to, I've just never heard one of those versions that sounded like a direct vector for the three verses I learned from my grandparents in the 1980's. Based on available snippets, it's looking oddly as though the closest thing might be the version incorporated into Moss Hart's Winged Victory (1943). I have ordered the playscript through the library and wish I could find an original cast recording. I am unfamiliar with the 1944 film beyond the fact that it preserved most of the original stage cast who also toured nationally. Or maybe there's just a popular recording I haven't heard. I learned Irving Berlin's "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" from these same grandparents and no one had to go through World War I for it.
The lilacs are emerging at the top of our street.
I wished these tulips well in their quest to be birds of paradise.
A raft of dogwood holding up the sky.
I miss the brick of our old neighborhood, so I like the one outcropping we have here.
This dogwood cut so beautifully across its house.
This one formed a screen.
Elegantly insectile.
I also miss the poppies of our old neighborhood, so this tulip doing its best impression pleased me.
Haven't a clue what this stuff is except brilliantly colored.
The ornamental cherry went full Maxfield Parrish in the sunset.
I got sick of pastorals.
Thanks to a stray line that got it stuck in my head last night, I became weirdly obsessed with trying to figure out my family's chain of transmission for the folk song variously known as "Army Life" or "Gee, Ma, I Want to Go Home." My grandfather famously got nowhere near the armed forces in World War II on account of being what
selkie once succinctly described as blind as half a bat. (He worked the duration of the war in the mill room of the California Ink Company and I wrote a poem about it.) I know it got out into the wild and was recorded by Lead Belly and Pete Seeger and even musicians I didn't grow up listening to, I've just never heard one of those versions that sounded like a direct vector for the three verses I learned from my grandparents in the 1980's. Based on available snippets, it's looking oddly as though the closest thing might be the version incorporated into Moss Hart's Winged Victory (1943). I have ordered the playscript through the library and wish I could find an original cast recording. I am unfamiliar with the 1944 film beyond the fact that it preserved most of the original stage cast who also toured nationally. Or maybe there's just a popular recording I haven't heard. I learned Irving Berlin's "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" from these same grandparents and no one had to go through World War I for it.
no subject
Thank you!
I heard that song at my beloved summer camp. Many of the campers were Canadian (we raised both flags, just before going in to tin pitchers of hot cocoa), and the version I heard was "Gee Ma, I wanna go / Back to Ontario ..."
I saw that variant on the internet! It's delightful. And put my brain back in Berlin territory: "I'll put my uniform away / And move to Philadelph-i-ay / And spend the rest of my life in bed . . ."
Claims of the song being originally Canadian would make "Ontario" the rhyme that "won't let me go" had to substitute for. I'm hoping I can find more information about it in Les Cleveland's Dark Laughter: War in Song and Popular Culture (1994) when I can get the book out of hock, by which I mean storage.
The best-loved sport at that camp was making parodies of show tunes.
Any especially lasting travesties?