UNBIDDEN MEMORIES

[Another venue in which I have posted some other writing is about to disappear if anything on the Internet can truly be said to disappear. i found a few pieces that seemed worth saving by reposting here.

The following I originally posted on June 1, 2005.]

Memory is a strange and wonderful thing, a thing that has been central for me for most of my life. I always had a great capacity for memory of facts, of texts, of poetry of lines for a play but of places and their sights and sounds and smells. Memory can play tricks on us, but one of its most delightful and yet most cruel tricks is recalling in perfect, exquisite detail places, things and people lost along the way.

On Sunday, March 13, 2005, Anna and I and our friend Rick Gager, went to the Mt. Baker Theatre here in Bellingham, Washington to see some movies. Mt. Baker is a movie palace decorated in the Moorish style popular in the early 1920's. It has just undergone a full restoration and is much as it would have been if I'd been alive and going to the movies to see Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow or Chaplain's The Tramp as new releases. So the theatre itself is something of a time capsule. One walks off a street in February, 2005 and into a lobby that actually once hosted Clark Gable, Loretta Young and Jack Oakie while they were filming The Call of the Wild nearby.

We had come to see a program of silent movies that were to be accompanied by members of the Theatre Organ Society on the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ which is on an hydraulic lift beneath a trap in the stage floor, downstage centre.

When we arrived we found that we were going to get an opening act that we hadn't counted on. The Bellingham High School Showstoppers mixed choral group was going to perform. We were a bit wary, but decided to stay. Anna and I were glad we did.

The kids in the Showstoppers were disciplined and excellent singers. Their teacher clearly selected most of the music. Her selections were far more problematic than the students' singing.

There was a delightful bit of Renaissance harmony. All Ye Who Music Love by Baldassare Donato, executed flawlessly and a fine rendition of the lovely ballad, My Funny Valentine (I think that Richard Rodgers mostly went down hill after Lorenz Hart died). But they opened with Happy Together, a 1960's song that you can't forget no matter how desperately you try. Rather than building on the beautiful success of the Donato piece, we got a rendition of One Tin Soldier, the title song from the gawdawful movie Billy Jack. My Funny Valentine which, with Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered), is one of the greatest love songs not written by Cole Porter or the Gershwins, we got an credible version of You Are the Song followed by a minor key, bluesy version of If I Only Had a Brain that didn't work and was never going to no matter who sang it.

The girls left the stage as I whispered to Anna that we know that their music teacher is certainly our age. The guys did a song called The Handsome Butcher that I'd never heard before and wouldn't care if I never heard again and then launched into The Auctioneer. Suddenly, I was no longer in the Mt. Baker Theatre. I was sitting in front of an oval TV screen in a living room that hasn't existed for over forty years watching the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. This was a bit of Time Travel that I hadn't counted on. I literally hadn't heard that song in forty-five years.

That, of course, made me realize that music teachers, particularly, carry a part of the past, their musical taste fixed when they were the age of their students, forward into the future. How else can I explain why my Elementary School graduating class in 1963, under the direction of a music teacher old enough to have studied with Pythagoras, did a medley of Victor Herbert songs. I still have unpleasant flashbacks to...

Slumber on, my Little Gypsy Sweetheart,
Dream of the fields and the groves.
Can you hear me, hear me in that Dreamland,
Where your fancies rove?

Despite the fact that Victor Herbert would have had to have been composing operettas when dinosaurs roamed the earth to have been popular in our music teacher's girlhood, that's obviously what happened, just as it had happened with this music teacher in Bellingham, Washington in 2005. My elementary music teacher grew up when Victor Herbert was the hot composer of "proper" music as opposed to that bawdy jazz that Negros and Jews were composing and playing. She (I have forgotten her name) wanted to pass down to me and my classmates an appreciation for Herbert's "proper" music.

She was too late. Cartoons from the late 1920's and early 1930's with soundtracks by Cab Calloway and others had already insinuated themselves as happy, bouncy music by the time I was in first grade let alone graduating from eighth. Singers on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town and other variety shows had already put Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and Harry Warren tunes in my head.

So there I was remembering the elementary music teacher whose name was long gone from my memory inspired by memories of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing The Auctioneer and surveying a living room - clock, pictures, wallpaper, bric-a-brac on the mantlepiece - gone before my eleventh birthday. That song sent me off into Memories of a Lost Time just as surely as that madelaine dipped in tea had sent Marcel Proust ambling down the corridors of memory.

Layered in there too was being in a movie palace from a lost time and the original purpose of the afternoon outing, to see some silent movies.

The guys next did a somewhat overwrought version of the Neil Sedaka chestnut, Calendar Girl, and we were ready for the girls to return. After a finish with the whole choral group that included I Believe, a song that always makes me feel that I need an insulin shot to get excess sugar out of my system, the Showstoppers stopped the show. They were wonderful kids who gave a wonderful performance. Their performance resonated with me in more ways, on more levels than most of them will ever realize.

We saw Laurel and Hardy's Soup to Nuts, Harold Lloyd in The City Slicker and a Little Rascals two-reeler called Hide and Shriek with an absolutely brilliant organ accompaniment that put all three of us, indeed the whole audience, into a time that none but a few of us ever knew. Still it was a time at which all of us could laugh.

In the end, still laughing over Stan and Ollie's slapstick, we walked out into the late afternoon light of 2005. But I can still see my Aunt Helen's living room before the fire in 1960, the lamps with their crystal pendants on each end of that mantlepiece, the other bric-a-brac reflected in the huge mirror over the fireplace and a Dickensian scene of a coach pulling into an inn yard on the wallpaper. I still wonder at my own time capsules of days and places and people gone. I wonder at those many rooms off the corridors of memory, at the few that will not open because I no longer have the key and the many doors that spring open unbidden and the few forgotten ones accidentally unlocked by the accident of a sight or smell or taste or a song like The Auctioneer.