The music of our lives

Dietrich compared love to “a summer with a thousand Julys,” and Garbo prayed merely to “Give us our moment!”  Judy Garland pleaded, “Birds fly over the rainbow, why then, oh, why can’t I?”

I am hoping, like Garland’s lyrics in the Great Depression-era “Wizard of Oz,” that if “You can’t have everything, be satisfied with the little you may get.”

I am endeavoring to cite the lyrics to bygone songs as a way to sum up the decades of my own lifetime and lifeline.  I hope to create a course in a July/August program inviting students to play musical instruments, create scenes with tap-dancing, and present poetic, thoughtful words, all to tell the biographical chapters of their own time, their personal story, its tastes, sounds, images.  I mean, Eleanor Powell’s dancing toes, or maybe Anne Miller’s lively sole and soul.

I like one-line titles, such as “Don’t cry Joe.” Or, earlier by a decade, the Ink Spots’ patient pledge “I’ll Be Around” as a postwar promise.

The subtler the song, the better, because as the students compose their exam essay, and explain what they were experiencing along with the composer and performer, the vocalist or musician at piano or sax or violin, it might invite the proper compromise between the actor/actress/dancer and the sensitive memoirist or mere listener, to sum up a romantic or nostalgic lifetime.

I hope I get enough students to sign up and pay up so I can present this invitation between Independence Day and Labor Day.  And tell the story of my own life the same way.  Judy’s depth and dignity,  Marlene's and Greta’s beautiful close-ups, mixing tragedy and pathos into an exotic cocktail at a noir nightclub.  Astaire and Rogers whirling absurdly and comically with class, verve and elegance, all the way to the Beatles, with the tribute to “Yesterday,” when “all my troubles seemed so far away.”

MIKE FINK (mfink33@aol.com) is a professor emeritus at the Rhode Island School of Design.