The Falling Mortal and the Only Dancer

This doesn't seem, somehow, a week for camp, and so instead here's something that simultaneously manages to be both more soothing and more bracing.  Miss Audra McDonald sings the poetry of Mr. James Baldwin as if it were exactly what she had been born to do, as indeed it may well be.

As you may have noticed, we've been having a spot of bother, not so much directly here in the Sandlands (elhamdulileh, as we say hereabouts), but in the region more generally.  Mr. Muscato and I are keeping a wary eye on what seems to be a distinctly disintegrating situation in our beloved Cairo, and we are just a tad more aware than usual that one's situation as an expat can change drastically, quickly.

But we carry on.  We've had a house guest this weekend, our friend The Teacher, who lives in a remote part of the country and comes into the capital now and again for a dose of cocktails and supermarkets, both of which are in short supply in her part of the world.  We were first pals a dozen years ago or so ago, back when I was a carefree bachelor and living abroad nearly for the first time, in West Africa, and we just happened upon each again last year.  It's an unusual thing in this transient part of the world to have such a comparatively old friend around, and very pleasant.  That she has a mouth like a truck driver and a highly entertaining tendency to pick up shop clerks and other random acquaintances just keeps things all the more amusing.

She headed out earlier this evening, and the house is quiet again.  The dogs are napping on the sofa, and Mr. Muscato and I are gearing up for another week.  Morning comes early, and all seems very ordinary, with the worries of the world (the several familiar places we've been watching overcome with fire and rioters on the TV screen chief among them) put as firmly on a back burner as we can manage.

Somehow, Baldwin's words (in McDonald's thrilling, heartbreaking, nearly perfect voice) shine through:

I know that love is the only answer
and the tight-rope lover
the only dancer.
When the lover come off the rope
today,
the net which holds him
is how we pray,
and not to God’s unknown,
but to each other:
the falling mortal is our brother!

I have, this week, very nearly lost the last of my patience for religion, or more accurately for its followers, given the idiocy currently (and more acutely than usually) being displayed on all sides.  In its place, I rather like Baldwin's formulation: praying not to some final great unknown, but to each other, to the tangible world around us and the people in it.  Losing sight of that is part, at least, of what causes these appalling, indiscriminate upheavals, even as they themselves are the result of long abuse, misunderstanding, anger building up as cancers do and with very many of the same consequences.  I'm not wise enough to go much beyond that, and I find myself falling back on the song's refrain:  some days, some days.  Some days just getting through the day has to be enough.  Tomorrow we will start again, watching and waiting for what's coming on down the line.

Compare and Contrast

Today, let's do a little show-biz exegesis, shall we? Herewith, three versions of one song, spanning, in various ways, three eras of entertainment and of interpretation.

First up, Judy. Her rendition - complete with an almost never-heard intro - is a reminder, among other things, of what a superb band singer she was. She brings all she's got to this number, but never for a moment lets you really think she believes it - a very Vaudeville attitude toward what could be a pretty cynical number.

Barbra's version is, as you'll see at the very end, actually from her appearance on The Judy Garland Show; in fact, it aired the fall before Judy's. Still, it's light years away from her hostess's playful but faithful rendition, poised as it is on the edge of mid-sixties "kookiness", as if just waiting for Laugh-In to happen.

Streisand at this age - just 21 - is amazing to watch; she's not so much performing as possessed by a talent she's still trying to figure out how to handle. That makes the bridge of this arrangement, a mishmash of other love songs, so odd and so oddly effective. How is it possible that this awkward, basically uneducated and unworldly girl can be at succeeding moments the gawkiest thing since My Friend Flicka and a one-woman compendium of twentieth-century show-biz?

Finally, the state of the art, turn of the century edition. Audra McDonald has the most "trained" voice of these three, and she gives a sense of acting the part of a nightclub belter rather than being one. Still, she's got the chops to put this one over, and her manic break midsong is if anything even more fun than Babs's.

What does it all prove? Honestly, I'm not at all sure, although I do know that I adore all three. I've never understood the need to choose one diva and automatically shower filth on any other. I think that maybe the lesson is: talent will out.