Fanagrams

As I sort through the various missed opportunities and regrets in my life, I keep coming back to two things; the time that I absolutely blew my college interview at Stanford (when asked to describe “who I was” to some pompous interviewer, I said, “that’s personal and I don’t wish to discuss it!), and the fact that I never saw the Beatles live.  I was first introduced to the Beatles at Ty Winterbotham’s house.  There was some sort of slumber party going on and she had the 45 of “I Saw Her Standing There” blaring into her living room.  It was a magical moment as everyone danced together and shouted the lyrics “When she crossed that room, my heart went boom and I held her hand in my-eeen!”  Please note that the early Beatle lyrics were nothing but doggerel. 

While I was not a passionate Beatles fan, they did hold an abiding interest.  John was married, Ringo was just too butt ugly to generate any appeal and Paul was of course the cutest.  That left George as the more creative favorite.  As a parent, I kept impressing on my young children that it was very important that they know all the names of the Beatles, and I would periodically spring pop quizzes in the car.  Unfortunately Frances always confused George Harrison with George Bush!  My father initially dismissed the Beatles as freaks, and confidently stated, “They won’t last a year.”  It must have been 1964, because I triumphantly remember buying the album Beatles ’65.

We did manage to go to a few concerts.  The Dave Clark Five stands out, because they were thought to be a knock off of the Beatles.  I remember closing my eyes at the concert and pretending they were the Beatles, but the effort fell short.  Another concert I distinctly remember was the Rolling Stones.  My mother had agreed to drive us down to McCormick place, but announced that she was not going to waste her money on this and would spend the time at a museum instead.  However, when we arrived, she reframed the event as a sociology field trip and decided that she would try and sneak into the concert.  We wished her good luck and scurried to our seats on the main floor. 

At the first chord, probably  “I can’t get no satisfaction,” we started screaming ourselves silly, for no other reason that we were so thrilled to be part of a joyous mass hysteria. 

When I see the black and white footage of the Beatles arriving in the United States, I think how great it would be to one of the teenagers in one of the crowd shots – a teenager with smudged, tear-streaked cheeks, wearing a cute buttoned-up shirt rumpled by the press of the crowd, hanging  over a fence in the remote hopes of spotting one of the Fab Four.  Now that would be something to show the kids.  If only I had gone to Woodstock.  In the middle of the Woodstock sound track, as an illustration of the mayhem, an announcer says, “Allan Fay, come to the blue tent, it’s a bummer, man.”  Just think, it could have been, “Bobbie Brown, come to the tent, it’s a bummer man.” 

 As we limply exited the auditorium, we found my mother totally pleased with herself.    She had indeed managed to sneak in.  She told the usher that she was ticketless because  she had left the auditorium to deal with her splitting headache.  She then produced the bottle of aspirin that she had just bought as a prop.  She feigned a grimace of agony, and as an added touch right out of an Excedrin TV ad, lightly pressed her fingertips to her temples. 

She then said that she had left her young daughter inside, who was probably beside herself with worry at that point.  The overwhelmed usher fell for it, and let her in.  She made her way to the top row of the topmost balcony, “I was in hysteria heaven,” she exulted, “The blond singer looked exactly like Lulu Runnells!”  The blond singer was Brian Jones who would die of a drug overdose the following year, and Lulu Runnells was one of Lake Forest’s most fashionable socialites.

 They say that every generation must have its own music, but the rock and roll of the 60s has transcended generations.  The Beatles and Rolling Stones are all well-represented on my kids’ iPODS, and they are always amazed when I already know the lyrics to “their” music.  I can even introduce them to some new music.  One of them was Procul Harum, who were something of a one hit wonder with their song “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” also known as  AWSoP on the internet fan club site.  

With the exception of Louie, Lou-ay, one of the advantages of early 60s music was that the lyrics could be distinctly heard and understood.  But by the time of the 1967 release AWSoP,  while you could still hear the words, the lyrics had moved far beyond the hand-holding  innocence of the early 60s.  There is much discussion of the meaning of AWSoP.  Two theories are most plausible to me.  One is that the “Whiter Shade of Pale” refers to Marilyn Monroe and her doomed love affair with JFK; the crowd calling out for more refers to her memorable and slutty singing of Happy Birthday, Mr. President, to a sold out crowd in Madison Square Garden.  The other obvious theory is that the “Whiter Shade of Pale” refers to cocaine, and the lyrics are a delusional mess.  I am very literal and linear person, so the following fanagram represents an attempt to tidy up the lyrics.

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (post, stop, spot) and the number of dashes indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following lines.  Your job is to figure out the words from the context of the poem.  Scroll down for the answers.

I hit my head bang bango, while turning cartwheels ‘cross the floor,

 I begin to —— like I’m seasick, but the crowd calls out for more,

The room was humming harder, as my soul did —— away,

When we called out for another drink the waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later as the doctor told his tale

That my face, at first just ghostly, turned a —— shade of pale

Real lyrics:

We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor

I was feeling kinda seasick, as the crowd calls out for more.

The room was humming harder as the ceiling flew away

When we called out for another drink the waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later as the miller told his tale

That her face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale

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Answers:  writhe, wither, whiter

Allan Sherman, of Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh fame, enjoyed an intense but brief popularity, releasing three albums in 1963 and then a rapid decline and premature death at age 49.  But it is still easy to identify an Allan Sherman fan some 46 years later.  I was standing in a buffet line with a medical colleague and a third person came up and said, “I always appreciate a good pair ‘o docs,” and both of us the recited the complete stanza, “a pair o’ noia is just a bunch of mental blocks, and when Ben Casey meets Kildare, that’s a ‘pair o’ docs.” 

Allan Sherman was a staple of my childhood since my mother idolized his word play and parodies, a talent that was right smack in her wheelhouse as she routinely wrote similar songs for birthdays and other family events.  An Allan Sherman biography notes that he started as a producer of the quiz show, “I’ve Got a Secret,” which landed him in Hollywood where he entertained at parties, including his neighbor Harpo Marx, and ba-da-bing all of he suddenly had a record contract and became a bi-coastal toast of the town.  Even as a ten year old, I knew something extraordinary was happening when my mother  put on her heels and poppit faux pearls to go downtown to a nightclub to hear Allan Sherman perform.  My parents never strayed from the comfy confines of their leafy suburb and rarely socialized with anybody beyond two or three degrees of separation.  Who knows, there might have been some swingers at a nightclub!  Maybe my mother was a bit jealous of Allan Sherman, but probably more excited that this sort of clever talent was well appreciated. 

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh apparently reached number 3 on the popular record charts, surpassing Elvis Presley and the early efforts of the Beatles.  The song, which is set to the tune of a Ponchielli opera, recounts the misery of a child just arriving at a summer camp.  “I went hiking with Joe Spivey, he developed poison ivy. Do you remember Leonard Skinner, they’re organizing a search party after dinner.”  It is hard to explain the popularity of this song – I certainly don’t think that it was his best – but one commentator thinks that it touched on the universal themes of fitting in, and in fact, assimilation was a central theme in Allan Sherman’s life.  His early songs were mostly parodies on Jewish folk songs and culture.  “Hava Nagila” became “Harvey and Sheila” and Alouetta became “Al ‘n Yetta.”  “Frere Jacques” became Sarah Jockman and Jerry Bachman exchanging gossip (How’s your cousin Shirley, well she got married early) and God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman turned into “God Rest You Jerry Mendelbaum.” 

However, Allan Sherman expanded beyond Jewish folk tunes – there were send ups of suburbia (Here’s to the Crabgrass), space travel and aliens (Six Foot Two, Solid Blue) and technology (Automation).  He frequently poked fun at himself.  In “Hail to Thee Fat Person” Sherman explained that his rotund figure was essentially the result of the Marshall Plan – his mother constantly told him to clean his plate because there were people starving in Europe.  In fact due to his efforts and those of other tubby patriots, “we kept this country out of war!” 

Allan also went were the where the original lyrics and his fervid imagination took him.  The song “You Went the Wrong Way Old King Louie,” was one of his better efforts, set to the tune of “You’ve Come a Long Way From St. Louis.”  This song was one of our family favorites. 

 You went the wrong way old King Louie, you made the population cry

‘Cause all you did was sit and pet with Marie Antoinette at your place in Versailles.

 Now we’re gonna take you and the queen down to the guillotine somewhere in the heart of town.

And when that fella’s through with what he’s going to do you’ll have no place to wear your crown.

 And now the country has gone kablooey -To King Louie was say fooey you disappointed all of France

But what can you expect from a king who wears silk stockings and pink satin pants.

 Allan Sherman was the master of the unexpected rhyme, which turned the lyrics from stupidly stupid to funnily stupid.  As you listened to the song, you would hear the word France and know a rhyme was coming, and you might anticipate dance, chance or evey romance, but you would never expect that it could be pants.  “C’est Si Bon,” became “I See Bones,” about a radiologist who sang, “I see things in your peritoneum that belong in the British Museum.”  I could picture Allan Sherman thumbing through his rhyming dictionary trying to find a rhyme for peritoneum.  Presented with few choices, he figured out a way to work “museum” into the verse. 

Similarly, my mother had a pink rhyming dictionary always at the ready near the kitchen telephone.  I think that her parodies peaked with a birthday song that she wrote for one of her friends with the improbable name of Hempie, who had just had a bout with jaundice after eating some bad sea food.  

“Hempie you excite us when you talk of hepatitis,

Your stool they had to study, since your eyeballs were so cruddy”

She was so taken with the excite us/hepatitis doublet that she used it almost annually as she serenaded Hempie.

“Hempie you no longer can excite us since you don’t have hepatitis

When your eyeballs stopped being yellow, you became a mellow fellow.”

 Sherman also wrote entirely new music which set him free from the limitations of a parody.  I think that his tour de force was “Good Advice” a song running about as long as Don McLean’s American Pie, where he provided advice to the great inventors throughout history.  Sherman encouraged Ben Franklin to go fly a kite even though it was raining, he told Isaac Newton to go take a nap under the apple tree to avoid getting sunburned, he pointed out to Otis that his moving box would work better if it went up and down instead of from side to side.  He gave his best piece of advice to the caveman Ooga MaGook who was uncertain what to do with his big square stone with a hole in the middle.  “Round off those corners, and Ooogie Baby, you’ve got the wheel!”  He would finish each verse with a two liner praising the advice – “I’m so worldly wise, I deserve a Nobel prize,” or “Harvard offered me a phi beta kappa key.”  I routinely use one of these lines as a staple of birthday songs that I have written – “The world is a better place since you joined the human race.”  (My other favorite line was written by my friend Sallie, “You are so very kind, you’d give your eyeballs to the blind.”)

 After poking around the internet, I found a YouTube video of Allan Sherman singing, which made more sense of the theme of assimilation.  Allan was singing with Dean Martin and Vic Damone, two of the coolest cats of the mid 1960s.  You sensed that Allan thought that he was finally part of the Hollywood elite, but it also looked like he was just trying a bit too hard, and that it just wasn’t going to happen.  Dean and Vic looked donair and elegant in their tuxedos, and the short, fat, Sherman with a buzz cut and heavy black glasses just looked out of place. The two men also had beautiful voices, and even though Allan sang on key, he really was not a great singer.  Sherman was eagerly grinning at his songs and glancing over at Dean and Vic, asking for approval.  Although Dean and Vic were smiling, it really looked more like they were laughing at him.  I think that Allan had failed to see the distinction between being part of the elite crowd and a buffoonish mascot, easily disposable.  Check out the video below.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vR9cT6Jyg4

After his initial three top selling albums, his songs became more pointed and bitter, perhaps because he found that the success he so coveted was actually hollow.  The Kennedy assassination soured the country’s mood as well.  He slipped into obscurity and found himself reduced to writing jingles for television commercials.  If Allan Sherman didn’t write it, he most certainly inspired the Burger King song from the 1970s:

“Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us.”  

All we ask is that you let us do it your way.”

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. like post, stop, spot) and the number of dashes indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with the previous or following line.  Your job is to figure out the words based on the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers. 

After Word War II, food was scarce and Europeans were starving and thin,

 That’s when Allan Sherman says his weight problems began to —–.

His mother said, “people are starving so you must clean your plate,

So he started to —– on pies and sweets and generally overate.   

This was the message of the Marshall plan that he could not ignore

He was told that —–fat is what keeps this country out of war!

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Answers:  begin, binge, being

The first image of Susan Boyle was a frowzy older women quietly sitting eating a sandwich in a room teeming with hopefuls waiting to perform on the British TV reality show, “Britain’s Got Talent.”  She came forward for a quick backstage interview and cheerfully admitted that she was never married, and in fact had never been kissed and lived alone with her cat Pebbles. 

Now picture a women with the physique of a stout pickle striding across the empty stage in sensible shoes, with a ribbon of sorts situated where one could imagine a waist once was.  She was wearing a matronly scooped neck lace number the same color of her pasty skin, and a contestant’s number was slapped haphazardly across her ample bosom.  When the judges asked her where she lived, she forgot the name of her village.  Then the judge grimaced at her age of 47, and in response did a very embarrassing bump and grind, which left both the audience and judges squirming uncomfortably in their seats.

 She indicated that she was ready to sing “I Dreamed a Dream” from the Les Miserables.  She faced three sharp tongued and cynical judges and an audience who presumably harbored a bizarre fascination in watching delusional singers totally humiliate themselves in front of a jeering crowd.  The introductory notes started and there were several moments of tension as everyone braced for some sort of atonal croak.  With a slight furrow of her uni-brow and clench of her double chin, Susan opened her mouth and sang.

Within one stanza of the song, the audience was on their feet cheering; her voice was brilliant.  The judges sat in slack-jawed shock.  But it was not so much her stunning soaring voice, but to me what was most remarkable was that it came out of this – let’s face it – total frump.  We rarely experience anything with a single sense, and are accustomed to seeing the visual trump the auditory – a marginal singing talent can be compensated by tarty outfits and makeovers.  Food that smells good tastes good.  Food that smells bad, like steamed cauliflower, can’t overcome the bad first impression unless there is enough butter and parmesan cheese. 

 The other remarkable thing was that her clear, liquid singing voice bore no resemblance to her slightly shrill and squawky speaking voice.  Athletes tend to look athletic so it is not too surprising to see LeBron dunk.  And sports physiologists have drooled over Michael Phelps physique, and have poked and prodded it to show that his arms are the perfect length for the butterfly stroke and his narrow and deep chest is ideally proportioned to maximize his lung capacity.  But with singers, how can you know?  Someone should crawl inside this women’s larynx to document its exquisite mechanics, investigate how it interacts with her lungs, because Susan can really belt it out, how it interacts with her eardrums since she is pitch perfect and then figure out how the whole package is connected to her heart – this woman was singing with effective emotion, far beyond what her limited never-been-kissed life experience would suggest.  A previous show had featured someone called Paul Potts who similarly walked onto the stage in an ill-fitting suit with the improbable dream to sing opera.  He explained that he never had any confidence since he was relentlessly teased as a child, perhaps due to his unfortunate name that prompted potty humor derision, or a comparison to the genocidal Cambodian despot Pol Pot.  Or maybe it was his weird snaggle tooth that made you wince when he smiled.  But as soon as he opened his mouth, like Susan, his singing voice bore no relationship to his speaking voice and he just stunned the audience.

 Susan approached the most challenging part of the song – a series of rising notes that would blow out an average person’s larynx.  But she nailed them.  Now the entire audience and the judges were in rhapsodic awe.  She wrinkled up her pug nose and when she nodded in recognition you could see a bald spot around her jagged part.  She finished with a flourish and when the judges gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up, she stamped her feet in excitement and did a fist pump, which set her kimono arms wagging.   The cynical crowd rose to its feet in appreciation of this triumphant underdog. 

 You also knew that you were witness to the first rush of pure, undiluted joy and saw Susan guilelessly exulting in her performance and her dream goal of performing before a live audience.  The news of her performance spread quickly around the world and the press descended on her Scottish village, she was interviewed on the morning news shows, and there is talk about her appearance on Oprah.  Reporters immediately wanted to know if she was going to have a makeover, do something about her grey thinning frizzy hair or whether she had been fielding marriage proposals – all a patronizing and barely designed cruelty targeting her physical appearance.  Who knows how this experience will change this unassuming and modest person, but I did notice that by the time of his last performance on Britain Has Talent, Paul Potts had gotten himself a snappy new tuxedo, his snaggle tooth was gone, most importantly the element of surprise was gone.

Before she sang, the judge had asked why her dream of becoming a singer had not worked out and she simply said, “Well nobody has given me a chance before.”  At the conclusion of her song you are left with the powerful message that nothing deserves to be casually dismissed and that the hidden talents that surely surround us are routinely squandered.  I am thinking of some sort of unassuming frog who is quietly harboring the perfect cure for cancer beneath his moist and delicate skin.  But his swamp is being drained and his muddy pothole is shrinking.  The next pothole is across the new highway that has divided his dwindling habitat.  With a timid croak he tries to hop across the hot tarmac but splat…

The missing words in the following poems are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop, post, etc.)  The number of dashes indicates the number of letters.   One of the anagrams will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.   Your job is to figure out the words based on the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

Of all our senses, it is the visual that usually ——

 It’s never brains over beauty, the ugly genius complains.

So when the frumpy —— opens her mouth what we expect to hear

 Is an atonal croak instead of a voice that’s pure and clear.

 So close your eyes when you listen, small, feel or taste

 Otherwise we —— ourselves to hidden talents that go to waste.

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Answers:  reigns, singer, resign