The song from the Broadway play A Little Night Music titled Send In the Clowns has always attracted me and something about it caused me to stop and give ear. I only knew a line or two of the lyrics. One day I looked the lyrics up on the internet, and I've been memorizing all the words just to have something definitive to sing when I practice the bel canto scales I used to know.
I try to go through some of the studies and exercises a little each day. The reason I do is a little sad. But, the real sad part is what will happen if I don't. I'm alone so much with nobody around to use my voice to say words I start to forget how to talk, much less sing. It's the same with anything I had to learn. Like crawling, then walking, then screaming my head off until I could learn to use words. Eventually, if I live long enough, everything I ever learned in order to cope with being alive, will be lost in order to make the Return.
The chorus is the tricky part of Send In The Clowns. I never memorized that part of the song. If I hadn't looked the lyrics on the internet, I might never have realized I didn't know the notes of the chorus. I would have just skipped over it like it wasn't there. Why would I not? Memorizing this wonderful song will not earn me immortality no matter how well I do it.
Earlier today, I thought of doing a search on Google Video to see if there were videos of people performing the song. That way I could sing along with them and learn the tricky musical line of the chorus. Actually, it's just one line that stumps me, and if I can get that down pat, I'll be good to go.
The real reason I got interested in learning the lyrics of this song was watching a video of Steven Sondheim explaining the circumstances of his originally composing the song. He wrote it the way he did because of the specific actress who played the part of Desiree who sang the song on stage.
He said this actress had every other characteristic he wanted for her to carry the part, but she wasn't the kind of singer who liked to stretch words out via the vowels, and so he wrote the song to fit the way she naturally sang, and doing that made her song the seminal tour de force it's become.
What the composer said in that video tempered what I heard the famous singers and actresses say when I watched their videos this morning. I had the inside scoop on why he wrote it the way he did. Barbra Streisand can't not stretch things out. The song was not written for her voice, as beautiful as it is in People.
Glen Close does a really good job, but she can't let it be a sad song, and it's a true funeral dirge for lost love. Judy Dench, Oscar winner and dubbed some sort of Dame by the Queen of England got it just right in my book. I'm prejudiced. so my opinion means little. When it comes to being an actress, she's top shelf, but so is Glen Close.
Some inauthentic female named Sumi Jo literally changed Sondheim's words, and I didn't even finish her video before I went looking again, but eventually I stopped to marvel again at what needed to be there for me to do what I did about this one song.
Most of my youth was pre-television, much less home computers, search engines, and the internet. I have literally hitch-hiked three thousand miles dead broke to spend an hour or two in the stacks of some library to get information I couldn't get anywhere else. Now, such nonsense is accomplished by pointing and clicking on a link that will have even more links when I get there.
I seem to be moving to a position in life in which I don't need anybody for anything. I know myself that I could tell any person who asked me a question to go look up what they wanted to know on the internet and they would get oodles of information much more useful than what i have to offer. I.E., not only do I not need them, but they don't need me either. Not for intellectual purposes, and sometimes love.
Send In The Clowns is about a woman who had an affair and a child with a fellow who didn't know he was the child's father or even that she was pregnant when they broke up. Years later, they run into each other again, and she fools herself into thinking there is a second chance with him, but he's in love with another woman who has also borne him a child he does know about, and cant' desert, and so she's singing the song about careless love. Who doesn't understand that?
I'm writing a lot to make time fly. I'm gonna refuse to get that colonoscopy for all sorts of reasons. The main one is that I might not survive it, and not just by my own judgement either. The news article on CNN about how many of the VA hospitals are not sterilizing their instruments between procedures and the recipients of the procedure getting AIDS and other incurable diseases is sure a factor. I have no intention of submitting my body to people who aren't careful about what happens to it while it's in their care. How could I know whether I need to be concerned or not.
The thing is that this procedure was ordered by my regular doctor as an exploratory procedure to find out if something might be amiss, not because there was something obviously amiss. It wasn't ordered to cure or investigate some known or tersely indicated condition. I don't think my GI tract could stand it. For whatever the true reason, I gonna say no unless it's life or death, and there's a good chance I'm gonna die soon anyway.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
