I was somewhat distraught yesterday that my column in the local paper was a bit garbled. Hopefully, readers figured it out but, for those who were confused, I reprint it here as originally intended:
Still Dancing ‘The Merry Minuet’
They’re rioting in Africa.
They’re starving in Spain.
The earworm has been with me for weeks. Actually, more like months.
There’s hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.
I can hear Bob Shane’s whistle as clear as clear after each line in that chorus. And I can almost smell the cigarette smoke and taste the whiskey sours that we always ordered at the Purple Onion or the Hungry i in San Francisco. We’d go early, get a table down front and stay through two shows before having to get back to the dorm for curfew. The Kingston Trio… sharing the bill with comedian Jonathan Winters or Mort Sahl or maybe Professor Irwin Corey. But always the Kingston Trio.
Usually, we were a party of four – my roommate Sandy, my fiancé Morgan, his brother Jim, and me. For the record, the two of us women married those brothers eventually, and our children are first cousins. Besides the ‘kids,’ only we two erstwhile roommates are left and both of us remember…
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles.
We went as often as we could, mostly because my future brother-in-law was a friend of the group’s. He had jammed with them, even rehearsed with them before they became The Kingston Trio. He and Dave Guard were friends at Stanford; they were in the same fraternity together. (Or was it an eating club?) But when the rehearsing got more serious and time-consuming, Jim decided he needed to pay more heed to his studies. He was out; Nick Reynolds was in. And we became groupies of a sort.
Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don’t like anybody very much!
In those days, we were amused by those lyrics to “The Merry Minuet.” Perhaps they were a bit shocking and they were definitely true. But, like Mort Sahl’s commentary on the daily news (with his signature prop – that day’s San Francisco Chronical tucked under his arm), nothing seemed quite as dire as today. Maybe because it was folk music. Maybe because it was stand-up comedy.
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man’s been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud.
However, the fact is that though the names have changed, the content… not so much. Hence, the earworm. Who’d have thought that all these years later we’d still be dancing to that same old tune?
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.
And, of course, here comes another overlay to the singing earworm: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” I think it was Edmund Burke or one of those other philosophers who made that remark. I was introduced to them in a fabulous course called Western Civilization, or ‘Western Civ’ in Stanford speak. But, I don’t think any of us paid enough attention.
Or if we did, it was only some of us, and we started way too late. And maybe we focused on the wrong things. Not long ago, I was criticized on FaceBook (or was it in this very paper?) for my interest in “assorted, (mostly) long-dead relatives, and not-so-epic (big yawn) tales of yore.” Well… there you go!
They’re rioting in Africa. There’s strife in Iran.
What nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man.
I liked them so much, once with Bill Cosby when I was going to Cal. Miss them — song lyrics don’t give me much meaning any more.