Ella, poets who suffer pain should fall in love with girls named Jane
Tonight was my family's annual Halloween party, which this year was full of children: my niece as Elsa from Frozen, Fox with the tail and ears of a black cat, Peter as a Rowling wizard, two granddaughters of a family friend (accompanied by their aunt rather than their mother, which it's good someone told me, because otherwise I thought I was having a terrible time telling faces in that family apart) in black-and-orange Halloween regalia. There was mulled cider and a lot of pizza and pumpkin-carving, which was the only time all evening I had a chance to sit down until people had left. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch's pumpkin reminded me of Sesame Street's Yip Yips and my sister-in-law of Hyperbole and a Half. Mine is the traditional cat. It was a good time.
For about a day and a half now I have been listening to the original television cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Evening Primrose (1966) with Anthony Perkins and Charmian Carr. It's wonderful music—four songs plus reprises and about half an hour of incidental music, lyrical early Sondheim. Given its whimsical, macabre, Twilight Zone-ish plot, I can understand why the musical never had more than a cult following, but at least two of its songs developed enough of an independent afterlife that I had encountered them in the wild before finding last month's YouTube clips and the other two are equally as strong, if more difficult to excerpt. (And clever. The lines that lead to the title of this post are a heartfelt but out of his depth poet trying to rhyme the name of his beloved: "Ella, gay as a tarantella / Pure as larks singing a cappella / Let my poem be your umbrella—") I am seriously thinking of trying to get hold of the DVD. And I still wish Perkins had done more musicals.
spatch's pumpkin reminded me of Sesame Street's Yip Yips and my sister-in-law of Hyperbole and a Half. Mine is the traditional cat. It was a good time.
For about a day and a half now I have been listening to the original television cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Evening Primrose (1966) with Anthony Perkins and Charmian Carr. It's wonderful music—four songs plus reprises and about half an hour of incidental music, lyrical early Sondheim. Given its whimsical, macabre, Twilight Zone-ish plot, I can understand why the musical never had more than a cult following, but at least two of its songs developed enough of an independent afterlife that I had encountered them in the wild before finding last month's YouTube clips and the other two are equally as strong, if more difficult to excerpt. (And clever. The lines that lead to the title of this post are a heartfelt but out of his depth poet trying to rhyme the name of his beloved: "Ella, gay as a tarantella / Pure as larks singing a cappella / Let my poem be your umbrella—") I am seriously thinking of trying to get hold of the DVD. And I still wish Perkins had done more musicals.
no subject
The more I listen to Evening Primrose, the more I'm impressed by it. "I Remember" is an entire song of childhood memories of the natural world expressed in similes from the department store in which the singer has lived since she was six: "And ice like vinyl on the streets / Cold as silver, white as sheets . . . Leaves / Green as spearmint, crisp as paper . . . Trees / Bare as coatracks, spread like broken umbrellas."
lovely work from spatch
I shall tell him! His cartooning skills really came out in this one.
Now I MUST see this...
...and my library has the DVD. Life is good.
Re: Now I MUST see this...
You're welcome! Technically this is mid-20th-century television, but I hope you enjoy it!
...and my library has the DVD. Life is good.
You definitely win.