I have a friend who scored heavily early in life and became a venture capitalist. Over lunch one day he entertained me by recounting the nutty projects that people brought to him for financing: a geriatric dog food, an electric fountain pen, cell-phone implants. I wish he were still capital venturesome, for I have an item that needs a backer — not yet invented, true, but one I long for: a karaoke machine that you can take into the shower.
The Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, Brookstone, and other consumer old-boy-costly-goofy-toy catalogs sell radios you can take into the shower, but thus far no waterproof karaoke machines. Pity. I can so easily see myself, shampoo in hair, soap on bristly cheeks — I am among the small but happy minority who have learned the art of shaving in the shower — microphone in hand, belting out “I’ve Got A Right to Sing the Blues” or “I Guess I’ll Get the Papers and Go Home” or “Mack the Knife.” Oh, Bobby Darin, thou shouldst be alive not at this but at that hour!
Older generations of literary men and women have had yards of poetry by memory. I envy people who can keep the vocabularies of four or five languages in their heads. I have had only bits of popular songs boppin’ around in mine. But of late I have taken to memorizing entire songs. I do so partly as a stay against the inevitable loss of those little grey cells that Hercule Poirot so often refers to, and partly for the sheer pleasure of singing them to myself, on long walks but more often in the shower.
I’d like to be able to report that I’ve just about mastered the Gershwin song-book; or committed all of Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hart to memory. But aside from Porter’s “You’re the Top,” which I do have by memory — “You’re the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire, / You’re an O’Neill drama, you’re Whistler’s mama, / You’re camembert” — my taste has run to simpler, more off-beat tunes. Among them have been “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “I’m Late, I’m Late,” “Fine Spring Morning,” “You’ve Come A Long Way from St. Louis,” “Comment Allez Vous,” “Stars Fell on Alabama,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” and “Sweet and Slow.”
I began with mnemonically more difficult songs. One of the first was Noel Coward’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” which I love for its intricacy. I later memorized his “Regency Rakes” — “Complacency never forsakes / roistering Regency rakes” — which shows the clear line, at least in this strain, between Coward and W. S. Gilbert. But these songs need fairly frequent rehearsal, lest whole chunks of them slip from my mind, which they inevitably do.
I do better with shorter songs. And it came as a surprise to learn how short some songs are. “The Way You Look Tonight” — “Keep that breathless charm,” etc. — is two lines shorter than a sonnet; Tom Lehrer’s “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” — “Roshashonna I spend in Arizuna, / And Yom Kippa way down in Mississippa” — is only one line longer; and “Miss Emily Brown” — that lovable, huggable girl who’s coming to town — is precisely sonnet-length. “Send in the Clowns,” Stephen Sondheim’s one entirely memorable song, took a bit more work, but was worth it.
Above all I’ve come to prefer the songs sung by my idols in this realm, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Fats Waller. All three could take the dopiest of lyrics and make them amusing by ironically undercutting them even while singing them. “My Very Good Friend the Milkman” contains two lines that may be as wretched as any ever written — “Then there’s a very friendly fellow, who brings me all the latest real estate news, / And every day he sends me blueprints of cottages with country views” — and yet Fats Waller, even while mocking them, is able to make them charming.
I often use one or another of these songs in the morning as a mental calisthenic — “cloak and suiters by the oodles, say it to their cute French poodles” — a way to ease my little grey cells into the day. But they have other uses. “I’m stepping out, my dear, to breathe an atmosphere that simply reeks with class” is especially useful to have in mind when stepping out into an atmosphere — an academic conference, say — that doesn’t. Sometimes the sheer throwaway cleverness sends me: “I’m a supper-club fanatic, / thunderstorm electrostatic, / from three points I’m automatic, / I’m your guy.” Yo.
Donald Tovey, the great English music critic, once claimed that he had enough music by heart to play at his piano for seven, possibly eight weeks. I now have enough song lyrics memorized to last, maybe, twenty minutes. A waterproof karaoke machine, I feel, would encourage me to expand my repertoire greatly. To own such a machine would be heaven. Or, as in the old joke about Nikita Khrushchev making love to Marilyn Monroe, heaven for me, hell for my neighbors.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
