I spent half of last week trying to finish "The Music Man" on DVD -- yes, I own it on DVD -- and as a result I had the Music Man on the brain. I had a serious moment where I serenaded Ace with "Sadder but Wiser" and realized how totally effing bizarre that song is. Sort of scandalous or maybe sexist except that the whole movie is a satire, at least parts of it are, and so I take all that in stride. I happen to think that it's one of the best musicals ever, although I admit I'm not a huge fan of musicals in general, but apparently it won the Tony over "West Side Story" back in the day. It's highly cheesy but I love it to pieces, I suspect because it feels somehow familial. My grandparents taped it off of channel 13 when I was a kid (channel 13 became, and maybe was at the time, UPN, imagine that), and one of the kids in the movie (the little blond boy who dances and pushes the library cart around) apparently lived down the street from my parents. Plus, my grandpa was from Iowa, so somehow I imagined that this gave me some kind of personal stake in the movie. Either way, I had a grand old time watching it the other day and was just struck, not surprisingly, with the urge to watch "Sadder but Wiser" again on YouTube, an urge primarily stemming from my wondering whether it was actually on YouTube, which it is, and which in retrospect is not surprising. Enjoy.
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I can't believe I don't own this movie. It seems just wrong. I do pretty much have it memorized though...I used to sing Lida Rose in the shower. Because I was a dork.
Oh, that has to go on the top of my Netflix queue now. We owned it on VHS at home and my sister LOVES this movie -- in fact today I sent her a New York Times article about band programs in New York City schools and she wrote back "But he doesn't know the territory! He doesn't know one note from another!"
An English teacher in high school used to like to say, "Earn your A, Hester." Little did I know at the time that it was not an allusion to The Scarlet Letter but to The Music Man.
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