Listening to The Music Man

 

I love ideas and good ones often show up right in our daily lives. John Ciardi’s “Lament for Cocoa” comes to mind.

Lament, For Cocoa

                        The scum has come. 

                                My cocoa's cold. 

                        The cup is numb,

                                And I grow old. 

 

                        It seems an age

                                Since from the pot

                        It bubbled, beige

                                And burning hot --

 

                        Too hot to be

                                Too quickly quaffed. 

                        Accordingly,

                                I found a draft

 

                        And in it placed

                                The boiling brew

                        And took a taste

                                Of toast or two. 

 

                        Alas time flies

                                And minutes chill; 

                        My cocoa lies

                                Dull brown and still. 

 

                        How wearisome! 

                                In likelihood,

                        The scum, once come,

                                Is come for good. 

 

 

 

Looking for a change from Mozart and Schubert, I put on The Music Man sound track.  What a wonderful job!  Long-lasting ideas and culture vs. small town fear and stress.  Pure confidence man meets lovely lass, Marion, the librarian.  The town intellectual and recluse left all his books to her!  Her, the woman who made brazen overtures to the man, who didn’t have a friend in that town until she came along.  The town biddys shouldn’t tell us this but that woman doesn’t belong on any committee.  She’s the one who made brazen overtures but if you melted her down, you’d find a lump of lead as cold as steel where a woman’s heart should be.  [This metallic description they want to apply to the young and outrageously luscious Shirley Jones.] She advocates dirty books (!!!):  Chaucer! Rabelais!  Balzac!  Ballllllllllll-zac!  Ball – get it? -zac!

 

It is worth watching the excellent “Talk a Little, Pick a Little” song as it catches the voices and personalities of the clucking hens and their frustrated disapproval of much of life.  I think it is the best piece in a  show filled with good music.