Some hit songs of the 60’s and 70’s are being revised with new lyrics to accommodate the aging:
It’s hard for anyone under the age of 40 to understand how things used to be. They never had to get up off the couch to change a channel on their tv; they never had to fight over the one phone in the house that was attached to the kitchen wall; they never knew how much a stamp cost or how big a deal it was when the price increased (usually by a cent or two) and they never had to carry around gigantic copies of their MRI films. Today, everything is conveniently stored on computers. Doctors can view your entire medical history with the click of a mouse.
They don’t even hand out illegible scripts anymore.
I’ve always liked writing*. I’ve written numerous music books and a series of YA stories. Even as a young child I remember writing absolutely everything down – my favorite foods, my favorite songs, my favorite outfits, my favorite movies… As a bored middle-schooler, I often created detailed polls for my classmates to vote on – and, yet, I still managed to graduate (ONCE, at the end of my senior year, not every few years as kids these days do – starting with Kindergarten).
Much like my Mom tells me how she likes the feel of a good book in her hands (I’m a proud 3rd-generation-Kindle-r myself), there’s just something about holding a freshly sharpened pencil (with a working, not chewed up, eraser) in your hands and knowing that there’s an infinite world of possibilities lying at the tip.
So whether you’re an academic, an artist or just a doodler, a simple pencil and a blank piece of paper can add hours of entertainment and great accomplishment to your life without the need of an electrical outlet!
*Hope you’ve enjoyed my first 100 hellomuddahhellofadduh blog posts…
Here’s a little bit of a conversation I overheard Mom having with her sister on the telephone the other day:
Mom: “Who told them they can sing?” – that would be Mom (who is tone-deaf) discussing a performance on a TV singing contest that she did not even watch.
Mom: “Why can’t they wear more clothes when they dance?” – that would be Mom giving her opinion of a performance on a TV dancing contest that she also did not watch.
Mom: “They don’t write songs like that anymore…” – that would be Mom’s take on any Broadway musical written before the 1950’s.
In my Mom’s world, nothing is as good as it used to be. All the ‘real’ singers and dancers have mostly died (a few, like Tony Bennett and Baryshnikov, are the obvious exceptions). So for her, and possibly for many others of her generation, the caliber of talent of today’s artists is in no way equal to that of their predecessors. But, hey, you can’t please everyone and (as my Mom has often been heard saying): “That’s what makes horse-racing!”
Giving credit where credit is due, the song, “Hello Muddah Hello Fadduh” was written by Allan Sherman in 1963. But it’s hardly original. That is to say, the lyrics are but the popular song, itself, was a parody of a classical piece written by Amilcare Ponchielli titled, “Dance of the Hours.”
In this Grammy Award winning novelty song, based on a letter of complaint sent to his parents by Sherman’s son while attending summer camp, the son describes unpleasant and even dangerous situations (in his humble opinion). The song (letter) ends with the rain stopping, the fun activities starting and the son stating, “kindly disregard this letter.”
We’ve all experienced good and bad times and none of us are exempt from exaggeration. So, when reading my posts, I hope you will take some of it with a grain of salt, learn valuable lessons from those personal experiences I’ve tried to share and remember, always, to love your life… And all that jazz!
hellomuddah hellofadduh 