Adjustments (And a Thank You)

 Margaret and I just got our second Covid vaccine shot (Pfzer.)  Our thanks go out to Humboldt County Public Health and to the volunteers who organized and administered the jabs.  Compared to what we're hearing from other parts of the country, it was a painless process, even if it seemed slow at times.  All we did was fill out one form--an "interest" form, as in interested in getting the vaccine--with just basic information, especially age.  The county methodically followed the state guidance, so there was a 75 and over beginning, followed by a 70 and over, etc.  Medicare cleared the need for insurance information.  After we completed the form online, we simply waited.  As soon as enough vaccine was available, we got emails inviting us to a clinic on a specific day.  We then made an appointment on that day.  That was it. We got another invitation for our second shot, which we got three weeks and one day after the first.  No running after rumors of who had the vaccine, constantly refreshing sites for an appointment, etc.  So we are very grateful for the County's efforts.  Public Health here has been great throughout this Covid crisis. 

Now we have a couple of weeks to adjust to the end of what has effectively been a year-long quarantine.  The mental adjustment for me will begin with activity.  My car doesn't start, my phone is obsolete, I've needed a new prescription for glasses this entire year, and a haircut would be nice.  Those items are where the list begins.

I also find myself adjusting slowly to the fact that we have an actual President of the United States.  I've felt resistance to fully accepting it, having been thoroughly traumatized by the past four years.  Washington politics is as fucked up as ever, etc. but Joe Biden is more than I could have expected.  He's putting together a potentially effective government in new ways--new especially since the 1930s.  His first address to the nation on Covid was just about perfect.  The covid Rescue law is a wonder.  So if any reader has noted an absence of commentary here that might suggest a lack of enthusiasm, that's not the case.  I've just having a hard time trusting this is really happening, and may not be reversed in a minute from now.

At the moment our weather is reflecting this transitional feeling.  The winter rains have not quite ended, but the flowers are blooming.

Poetry Monday: Pennies From Heaven

A long time ago, a million years B.C. 

The best things in life were absolutely free

 But no one appreciated a sky that was always blue 

And no one congratulated a moon that was always new...

 So it was planned that they would vanish now and then

 And you must pay before you get them back again 

That’s what storms were made for

 And you shouldn’t be afraid for

 Every time it rains it rains pennies from heaven

 Don’t you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven

 You’ll find your fortune falling all over town

 Be sure that your umbrella is upside down 

 Trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers

 If you want the things you love you must have showers

 So when you hear it thunder don’t run under a tree 

There’ll be pennies from heaven for you and me.

 --lyrics by Johnny Burke to music by Arthur Johnston

top photo by Cartier-Bresson

 Popular songs have a lot in common with formal poetry, apart from their shared origins in chant and song. The best song lyrics have qualities found in poems. This lyric by Johnny Burke for instance has an initial argument or premise, and the rest of the song follows from it, until, like a Shakespearian sonnet, it is recapitulated in the final couplets.

There isn't a wasted syllable in this lyric.  The echo of the "und" sound in "thunder" and "under" is a skillful and effective internal rhyme, but more subtle is the corresponding echo of the "a" sound in "planned" and "vanish."  There are literary poems that are less adept. 

 Though this song has been recorded and performed a vast number of times, it seldom has included more than the chorus: the last eight lines. So the song really doesn’t make sense until you get to those late lines, and “If you want the things you love you must have showers...” But with the initial verse, the point is very clear, and much more powerful.

 I could find only three recordings of the entire song, beginning with the first, by Bing Crosby in 1936 and ending (for now) with James Taylor’s version in his 2020 American Standard album. Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke wrote the song and several others for Crosby’s movie titled Pennies From Heaven. His version was a hit record in 1936. These lyrics as a whole are both sobering and hopeful.

 And that’s perhaps why the version using the entire song released in 1937 by singer Arthur Tracy is the one selected for the Dennis Potter BBC 1978 miniseries and the subsequent 1981 movie, starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. Both productions used vintage recordings while contemporary actors lip-synched to them. New Yorker film reviewer Pauline Kael put her finger on why Tracy’s version is so memorable and appropriate—he sings an upbeat song while sounding like he’s on the verge of crying.

 Potter’s teleplay and screenplay were set in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the song itself was written then. It’s subject is the Depression, as its first audience would have understood. The line “you’ll find your fortune falling all over town” is a succinct description of how the Depression’s effects quickly accumulated, as people lost their savings, a major part of their income or their jobs, perhaps even their homes. Middle class people—teachers, nurses, mid-level executives—found themselves on the street. Desperation looking for solace was a natural condition. 

Within the song however, those lines function in the opposite way.  Future fortune is literally falling all over town from the sky, collected by that upturned umbrella.  This is a conceit Shakespeare might have written, if he'd been a 1930s songwriter.

  Whether Dennis Potter’s series or movie caught the more characteristic and complex moods of the Depression beyond desperation and denial is debatable. However, this lyric and its premise as metaphor stand on their own, transcending their original time. Today, as the slow end of the Covid crisis looks to be in sight, the idea of better times as a payoff for enduring hard times resonates again.

 Johnny Burke wrote lyrics for other popular songs such as “Imagination” (a hit for the Glenn Miller band), “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Misty” and a staple of my childhood, “Swinging on a Star.” (“Would you like to swing on a star/carry moonbeams home in a jar...”) 

 Thanks to the Dennis Potter films, 1930s singer Arthur Tracy came out of retirement in the 1980s for one last series of engagements at New York’s The Cookery, which also revived the careers of cherished musical elders Eubie Blake and Alberta Hunter.  Here's a link to the 1981 movie scene with his rendition of “Pennies From Heaven.” (For some reason I'm unable to embed it here.)  Although the British miniseries used the entire original recording, the MGM movie substituted a new instrumental bridge by Marvin Hamlisch. The dance sequence featuring Vernal Bagneris is itself worth seeing.