Some enchanted evening

Is it old fashioned to love musicals? Maybe it’s the romance in them that catches me. Romance in the real meaning of the word – “a spirit of or inclination for adventure, excitement, or mystery” together of course with the joy and heartbreak you also associate with love. Who doesn’t like a fairy tale?

My mother loved musicals too. We had an old gramophone when I was growing up – one of those cabinet ones with two doors that opened onto a radio that you tuned with a knob and a pull-out shelf with the record player underneath! Slots in the side to store your LPs – and Mom even had some old Ivor Novello 45 RPM records. Don’t ask. I can’t possibly explain if you’ve never heard of either him or 45s.

And her collection of LPs of musicals was legendary. They were wonderful! We had Oklahoma, Gigi, and West Side Story, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, The King and I, South Pacific … And I knew just about every word to every song. No dvds then and nothing to download. Just songs and imagined pictures of what they meant.

Then Bulawayo got its first theatre. 1969 it was and Rainbow Cinemas opened with a surround sound theatre! The very first movie I ever saw was Paint your Wagon with Lee Marvin ‘singing’ I was born under a wandering star. After that we actually got to see many of the old favourites and they all lived up to my mind-pictures. And the list grew longer, with films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Hello Dolly!, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Mary Poppins, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Wizard of Oz. Bugsy Malone, Grease, Cabaret and of course the Elvis movies, Cliff Richard and the Beatles.

Disney was a god-send as the musicals grew thin on the ground for a while. New doors were opened with his spectacular versions of The Jungle Book, Aladdin, Cinderella, Snow White, Lady and the Tramp, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. By then I had a daughter but it never mattered whether I went alone or took her. You don’t need a child to enjoy animation! They do help to remind you how fantasy is food for the soul if you’re getting a little jaded, but I, luckily, have never had that problem.

And I was old enough too to take myself places (like Dr Seuss). London West End and the smell of an old theatre! Broadway still to come but it will never matter where I see the show. I’m just a sucker for a musical! Some enchanted evening indeed.

What a wonderful world

My father had an improbably sweet view of life on earth. Which is strange, thinking that he came from hardy farming and mining stock and lived through both World Wars and the then-Rhodesian bush war. He had a never-ending fund of stories about his life and my biggest regret is that I never wrote them down before he died.

Dad was born in 1905 onto a farm in Southern Rhodesia. That was what he did. He farmed. Bush, cattle and buck. His interests. In that order. Water, dip, mielies, whirlwinds, dust, gun dogs, gold mines, grass and acacia trees. The list of what evokes him and his stories is endless. By the time I really knew him, he had settled into a farming life in town and went almost daily out into the sometimes harsh and often beautiful Rhodesian bush to tend to his cattle and do what farmers do all day!

He only stopped farming in the Seventies when it became too dangerous to go alone onto the farm because of the armed struggle raging throughout the country. The farm was sold and he passed away soon after.

But Dad was a sentimentalist, a softy at heart. He cried when he was touched and loved romance. Louis Armstrong’s gravelly deep throated singing suited him just fine. He’d sing along with him

I see trees of green, red roses too

I see them bloom for me and you

And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

And you knew he really did love us, his family, and the countryside around him.

I often wonder how many of our memories from childhood are real and how much is built up like lego blocks from things we hear. Things that then become your memories. Are they things that really happened to you or did they happen to someone else? If you think your parents felt one way, did they really? Are you just projecting your ideas and opinions onto them and believe they must have felt the same way?

I read a moving newspaper commentary recently by a columnist who was honest enough to talk about having strong opinions. As he said, something happens, often something atrocious in another part of the world, and within hours of it happening, comment is already out there. So how does what you hear or read affect you? Does your opinion change depending on what you read? Should it?

If you feel sympathy for the victims of an attack, is it bad that you haven’t felt as strongly about victims somewhere else? And if you don’t express your opinion? Is it worse to not say something or to say something that seems inappropriate to some people?

He ends saying that all you can really do is to talk about your own feelings, your own opinions, however unsure you may be or whether you think you have said everything there is to be said. Not many people do that.

I can’t get no satisfaction

Have you ever sung along to a song and only realised much later that you had it all wrong? You were absolutely sure that Bruce was belting out “I got my first real sex dream…” and you were delighted because you were pretty much having yours right there and then, and then he followed it up with

Bought it at the five-and-dime

Played it ’til my fingers bled

It was the summer of ’69

Hmm.  Well, good to know where you could get one but a bit of a tough act to follow.

Madonna and her “touched for the thirty-first time” was another classic and not at all difficult to imagine either! Although honestly, if one really is still a virgin, what had been wrong with the first thirty times?

A long time before those realities even entered my mind, I was at a school and going through the just-learning-about-sex stage and loved the impropriety of inappropriate lyrics. Only inappropriate of course if anyone any ever heard them but this was all in my own head and I think I would have been hard put to explain what they really meant if asked.

I can’t get no sexual action

‘Cause I try and I try and I try and I try

[But] I can’t get no, I can’t get noooo [satisfaction]

Who better than the Stones to talk about sex of any sort?!

And then there was “Walking back to hap-penis I shared with you, woo-pah” which was just plain silly but I didn’t often get the chance to say the word out loud (no brothers!).

In my youth there were certain pop stars who were deemed “acceptable” and others definitely not. My mother loved Cliff Richard but found Elvis Presley too raunchy. All that hip rolling was unnecessary! The Beatles were odd and very loud but fairly clean cut – in comparison with the Rolling Stones who were just plain dirty. She really just liked “a nice show tune” and I grew up knowing every word to the songs in movies like Paint your Wagon, Oklahoma, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. All jolly good clean fun. West Side Story was also a favourite but was much darker – much more what we might have analysed at university, if we had bothered to look below the surface. ‘Somewhere’ is still hauntingly beautiful to me and remains my dream song

There’s a time for us

Someday a time for us

Time together with time to spare

Time to learn, Time to care

Going back to the different words story, at university, one of the songs of the day was PP Arnold singing ‘Angel of the morning’ on her album, Kafunta. A powerful voice and one which we did spend many late nights listening to, high on our perceptions of our own invincibility and visions of the many ways our world would be a better place. Many years later, singing along in a pub we all changed the words to

Just call me angel of the morning angel

Just brush my teeth before you leave me, baby

which definitely lowered the tone. Probably akin to our by then lower aspirations and better understandings of how much more difficult it was going to be to achieve what we first thought possible.

We should have listened to Elvis when he crooned “Wise men say, Only fools rush in” but then again, even the King didn’t escape our wit

Take my heart, take my hand, take my whole leg too

For I can’t help falling in love with you

Misty blue

Recently, a number of my friends have been having issues with aged parents – either illness, senility or death. This has never been a part of my life because both my parents unfortunately died when I was young. My mother had terrible cancer and died the year I turned seventeen. She was younger than I am now. My father lived longer, re-married and died aged seventy-two, now more than twenty years ago. So I have experienced illness and death at close range but nothing is so devastating as sudden death.

My daughter’s boyfriend was killed in a car crash. That was it. Just gone. She was overseas and came back the next day. This song played in the car as I drove to the airport to fetch her. Not a dirge at all but a song about lost love

Ohhhhhhh, no I can’t no I can’t

I can’t forget you

My whole world turns misty blue

I felt that as I drove – a kind of haze in front of me. But in it I could imagine him quite clearly, see his face and hear his voice, see them together and remember the very last time I saw him.  It really is almost impossible to believe you’ll never see someone again. A life turned misty blue.

I think now far more often about my own parents. I can’t imagine them older yet I visualise them with my daughter, the grand-daughter they never knew, and perhaps even her children, my still-to-come grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. What I am most sorry about is not taking more notice of them when they were alive.

My parents were of pioneer stock in what was then Southern Rhodesia. My dad owned a gold mine and then a cattle ranch and through our early years he would tell stories about prospecting for gold, hunting, living in the bush, and running the farm. We heard about the buck he shot, the dogs he owned, we knew the names of all the cows he milked and the men who had worked for him over the years. They were superb stories but we took it for granted that would just always be there. No blogs then.

My mom was always in the background but at the same time, really important. She ran the house and grew the most amazing dahlias. She hand-made all our clothes and taught us to sew and bake. She was there for us when we went to school and came home and she and Dad sat talking together for hours in the evenings. I would like to think she was an equal partner in all he did. I’ll never know because I never asked.

I remember them both in the same haze. It’s just fainter.