Saturday, November 02, 2013
Special Projects
For reasons that should be obvious to everyone, I'm trying to pick out a show tune I can use to write a parody song about real estate tax judges. For reasons that are wholly mystifying, I'm having a terrible time of it. I've seriously been googling for about three hours here, and for once that is not a dirty pun. Can you believe that Cole Porter never wrote a song where the refrain ends with the exact number of syllables and division of stressed and unstressed syllables I need to put in the name of the appropriate court? I feel like he was really falling down on the job there. Especially since I have now learned that he wrote songs called "At Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe in Cheyenne" and "That Zip Cornwall Cooch." And don't even get me started on "Beautiful, Primitive Indian Girls." Didn't the Greatest Generation come of age in some racially interesting times?
I've actually learned a great deal today, which is part of the problem. I'm just trying to get a song list from My Fair Lady so I can figure out if I can cram assessment jokes into any of the big numbers and then I get drawn into the whole Julie Andrews/Audrey Hepburn controversy and the next thing I know I end up reading the entire Wikipedia entry. Or did you know that Gertrude Lawrence had cancer (and didn't know it) for pretty much her entire run in The King & I? I sure didn't, but isn't that depressing? She died before the original show even closed. Oscar Hammerstein II also died of cancer. And Richard Rodgers had it but survived before dying of something else. What an uplifting afternoon I have caused this to be!
Anyway, I blame science. They can send a man to the moon but they can't invent a machine that would just write this damn thing for me. Tragically shortsighted, if you ask me.
For reasons that should be obvious to everyone, I'm trying to pick out a show tune I can use to write a parody song about real estate tax judges. For reasons that are wholly mystifying, I'm having a terrible time of it. I've seriously been googling for about three hours here, and for once that is not a dirty pun. Can you believe that Cole Porter never wrote a song where the refrain ends with the exact number of syllables and division of stressed and unstressed syllables I need to put in the name of the appropriate court? I feel like he was really falling down on the job there. Especially since I have now learned that he wrote songs called "At Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe in Cheyenne" and "That Zip Cornwall Cooch." And don't even get me started on "Beautiful, Primitive Indian Girls." Didn't the Greatest Generation come of age in some racially interesting times?
I've actually learned a great deal today, which is part of the problem. I'm just trying to get a song list from My Fair Lady so I can figure out if I can cram assessment jokes into any of the big numbers and then I get drawn into the whole Julie Andrews/Audrey Hepburn controversy and the next thing I know I end up reading the entire Wikipedia entry. Or did you know that Gertrude Lawrence had cancer (and didn't know it) for pretty much her entire run in The King & I? I sure didn't, but isn't that depressing? She died before the original show even closed. Oscar Hammerstein II also died of cancer. And Richard Rodgers had it but survived before dying of something else. What an uplifting afternoon I have caused this to be!
Anyway, I blame science. They can send a man to the moon but they can't invent a machine that would just write this damn thing for me. Tragically shortsighted, if you ask me.
