SINGING
There was always music in my childhood home, whether it was a record playing or Grandma dancing to Armenian folk music. From infancy on, music was an important part of my life.
Musicals were really big in our household — the Rodgers and Hammerstein ones, especially. When I was sick I’d take my medicine to the tune of “A Spoonful of Sugar” from Mary Poppins. I fantasized about being one of the adorable, Von Trapp children in “The Sound of Music”. I empathized with being a dame in “South Pacific” and washing men “right out of my hair”. How I longed to ride with a handsome cowboy in a surry “with the fringe on the top”, like in “Oklahoma!”.
Show tunes were a very useful means of conveying mood. When leaving the house we’d sing “So long, farewell…” from “The Sound of Music”. If I was hungry, I’d use a tune from “Oliver” and adopt an English, cockney accent to ask “please sir, can I have some more”.
I grew up thinking show-tunes were a standard means of communication. But when I went to school and sang, “I feel pretty, oh so pretty…” in the classroom, my teacher wasn’t amused. Personally, I think if there was more singing and less talking in school, everyone would be a whole lot happier.
Musicals were also my guide to what a relationship between a man and woman should be like. And I’m not talking about a “Phantom of the Opera” kind of relationship. Back then, men did the wooin’, women allowed themselves to be wooed, and there were no grey areas in-between.
The love of your life would recognize you, or you would recognize each other, magically. Blue birds, or some other harbinger of future happiness, would hover overhead. You wouldn’t have to figure it out all on your own.
Your eyes and those of your intended beloved would meet, and that would be it. Gorgeous guy falls in love with shy woman. He adores her , “worships the ground she walks on”. They get married. She gives him kids. He gives her a house, car, credit cards, cash, and a nightly headache.
The boys I met were never as handsome or rakish as those in the musicals. Nor did they always say the right things to make me feel “pretty, oh so pretty”. And there were other disappointments. A guy shouldn’t turn out to be a major loser in the intelligence department. A gal shouldn’t receive a marriage proposal without ever getting a ring.
As I grew into a teen, my musical tastes changed. I increasingly turned to opera, rock and folk music for relationship guidance. I’d get sick, think I was dying, and have fantasies of making every boy who ignored me feel sorry. I was Mimi in “La Boheme”, singing my heart out to my boyfriend while I died of consumption. I was Cio-Cio San in “Madame Butterfly”, despondent over my no-good, cheatin’, sailor husband. I was the tragic Maria in the Romeo-and-Juliet tale of gang warfare in “West Side Story”.
I wanted to get rid of my dark, Cher-like looks. I’d rather be the kind of lady “with green eyes and golden-hair” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young crooned about in “Genevieve”. I wished I could run upstate to Woodstock, which sounded pretty nifty in their song. But I was on the young side during the heyday of the socially-conscious music of the 60’s and 70’s. So no-way would my parental units allow me to do more than iron a peace sign on my jeans. Like, bummer, Man.
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