Musical Fun

Mark has what could only be called eclectic taste in music, his favorites running from KISS to Moody Blues, from Frank Sinatra to Frank Zappa, to the old time country music (“All my ex-es live in Texas” or “My Wife Thinks You’re Dead” by Junior Brown, for example.) The Frank Zappa tends to focus on the “Mammy nuns / Thingfish” opera while the Sinatra is the “Duets” album and the Moody Blues is simply everything – but particularly “I know you’re out there somewhere” for what might be obvious reasons.

Lately he’s been singing “Beauty School Dropout” from the musical “Grease.”

He is hopelessly attracted to the ridiculous in lyrics – did you know there is a song about “puppy wee-wee blindin’ me?” Well, maybe not ‘about’ that, but that is, in fact, one of the lines. (Unless he is completely pulling my leg, which I can never quite tell.) The old standard ‘mystery lyrics’ of “someone left a cake out in the rain, and I don’t think that I can take it” has nothing on the stuff he can come up with.

I tend to pick up the tunes really easily but don’t attend to the words at all when I listen to music – so I can hum anything but can’t sing very much. Mark, on the other hand, zeroes in on the words. He remembers them; he can resurrect them at appropriate times; he can sing along with almost anything the world can throw at him.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was able to launch right into “Lydia the Tattooed Lady*” along with Kermit the Frog when he brought home the first season DVD of the Muppet Show last week. (We’ll leave it to another day to talk about why he would have thought he needed to buy the first season DVD of the Muppet Show – another day when I figure it out myself.) The song is, evidently, a favorite of Jim Henson, and an old Groucho Marx song (from At the Circus, for those of you who always want the Straight Scoop. It also appeared in the 1940’s version of “The Philadelphia Story.”) Who knew? Anyway, just for laughs, some excerpts:

Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia.
Oh Lydia The Queen of Tattoo.
On her back is The Battle of Waterloo.
Beside it, The Wreck of the Hesperus too.
And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue.
You can learn a lot from Lydia!

OR

When her muscles start relaxin',
up the hill comes Andrew Jackson.

OR

She once swept an Admiral clear off his feet.
The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat.
And now the old boy’s in command of the fleet,
For he went and married Lydia.

At least it's never dull at my house...

(*Written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg)