This is a flashback to four years ago. Yeah, hashtag it with Twirl-back Tuesday or something clever. I missed Music Monday but I can’t let this wait another week. It’s too important. Honestly, I was a bit slow working up to a Christmas spirit this year. I was beginning to think after this election, the best holiday spirit I could come up with would be vodka.
But it’s important to keep our center and not be blown off our course by winds we knew could be coming our way. More on that later. For now, I need a little Chrismas.
This is one of the songs that even when I just have been working too much or shopping too much, or the year has flown by too quickly, no matter what is going on this song gets me in the spirit. But it has to be Angela Lansbury’s version in the musical Mame. Nobody else has the passion, and personality in it. There is something about the urgency in her voice. Oh, it just gives me goosebumps and makes me smile.
The footage from the musical doesn’t seem to be online anywhere, so to remind you, this was set in the roaring twenties before we had commercialized Christmas so much that the department stores were already being preparing for it at Halloween. I believe that it’s just after Thanksgiving in the story line, and so not even a “single flurry” yet in New York. And nobody was thinking about rolling out the holly or the tinsel just yet.
And maybe, like me, this year you have been slow to feel the warmth of the season. Maybe it’s a lonely time or a scary time for you. I understand. But when we flash back to the twenties here via Angela Lansbury’s 1966 voice, think about what we need when it comes to that spirit, what it could really mean, about kindness and giving, not about the buy-them-this-so-they’ll-love-you farce that it’s become.
Four years ago, when I played this for my beloved Brian, youngin’ that he is, he replied, “You mean she was somebody before ‘Murder She Wrote?” I’ve schooled him a bit on her since then, you can be sure.
Happy Christmas!
Related articles
- Andrea McArdle to Take on ‘Auntie Mame’ Twice This Spring! (broadwayworld.com)
- My Top 5: Christmas Songs (5pinkave.com)
- Soundtrack (phenomenalmama.com)
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