Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

This song is in my all time Top 20 Songs Of All Time. I have perhaps 12 artists giving their spin. I play it often at this time of year & I have 2 different versions (Ricki Lee Jones & Ella Fitzgerad) that bookend my Spring Mix that friends are clamoring for:

Once I was a sentimental thing

Threw my heart away each spring

Now a spring romance hasn't got a chance

Promised my first dance to winter

All I've got to shows a splinter

 For my little fling!

Spring this year has got me feeling

 Like a horse that never left the post

I lie in my room staring up at the ceiling

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Mornings kiss wakes trees & flowers,

& to them I'd like to drink a toast

I walk in the park just to kill lonely hours

Spring can really hang you up the most.

All afternoon those birds twitter twit,

I know the tune, this is love, this is it!

Heard it before & I know the score

& I've decided that spring is a bore!

Love seemed sure around the New Year

Now it’s April & love is just a ghost

Spring arrived on time,

 Only what became of you, dear?

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Spring is here, there's no mistaking

Robins building nests from coast to coast

My heart tries to sing

 So they won't hear it breaking

Spring can really hang you up the most!

College boys are writing sonnets

In the tender passion they're engrossed

But I'm on the shelf

 With last years Easter bonnets

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Love came my way, I hoped it would last

We had our day, now that's all in the past

Spring came along, a season of song

Full of sweet promise

 But something went wrong!

Doctors once prescribed a tonic,

Sulphur & molasses was the dose

Didn't help a bit, my condition must be chronic

Spring can really hang you up the most!

All alone, the party's over

Old man winter was a gracious host

But when you keep praying

 For snow to hide the clover

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Landesman/Wolf

1955

Considering Streisand On Her 70th Birthday

Sometimes I am not the very model of a modern homosexual. I was insane for Barbra back when she was “Simply Barbra”, with the Egyptian eyeliner, the kooky thrift shop clothing, & the Modigliani posturing. Her television specials (1965-1973) were unlike anything I had seen before & I was mesmerized. The first was My Name Is Barbra (1965) made in black & white,& then came Color Me Barbra (1966) which has a sequence shot at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with Streisand wandering among the masterworks & antiquities, singing Where Or When dressed as Nefertiti. Next she's among a circus of animals, singing Try To Remember to the elephant & poking fun at herself by looking eye to eye at an anteater & singing- "We have so much in common, it's a phenomenon." The final act is just her singing at a microphone, with Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home & It Had to Be You. It made quite the impact on little gay 12 year old Stephen. I decided that a person with a big nose & unusual looks could be sexy & talented & adored instead of being made fun of & feeling like an outcast. I had talent damn it, & I was going to be a star!


I obsessively listened to her albums up through Stony End & then I started to loose interest. She took me down that Stony End, I never wanted go down that Stony End, but she took me down that Stony End. She was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn who “was raised on the good book Jesus & my mother worked the mines”. Huh? She seemed to be a woman with a once in a century vocal instrument & very questionable taste in material. Who could blame her for trying to be contemporary? Barbra started a career singing songs that were decades old then & going out of fashion. Songs from the theatre & standards being "the" pop music were being replaced with Rock & Folk.  It was Dylan & The Beatles. But, I would come back to her. I loved the album from 1974 simply named Barbra Streisand. It has a beautiful cover of Paul Simon’s Something So Right, that still gets to me, but it was followed by the horrible Butterfly with a really stinky cover of David Bowie’s Life On Mars (was there ever a worst match of material & singer?)...  & so it went through the decades. I would fall in love with her all over again with The Broadway Album (1985) & then she would come up with icky drek like A Love Like Ours (1999) with not a single redeeming cut.


I downloaded her latest, the Diana Krall produced- Love Is The Answer. Each song is done with a version done with Diana’s jazz quartet & a version with full orchestra, with arrangements by super-duper Johnny Mandel. The album contains some of my favorite songs…ever. In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning is like champagne & velvet. I appreciate that, at 67, her voice was richer on the bottom notes & huskier & a bit rough around the edges.

Last year, she did a small club gig (her last time was in 1961!) at the Village Vanguard for a small group of about 80, mostly fans that won the tickets in a contest from her website, plus pals like Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker & the Clintons. I think that would have been amazing thing to have experienced. I was fortunate to see it in the comfort of my home, thanks to PBS. Barbra won me over again. I found her performance to be funny, raw & rather astounding. 


I have even more conflicted feelings about her film work…but not on this post, except to say that What’s Up Doc? is one of the best film comedies of all time & one of my favorites. When Barbra sings You’re the Top to Ryan O’Neal? Like Buttah.

Barbra singing Memories = please, NO!


Barbra singing C'est Si Bon from Color Me Barbra = perfection.

Old Broads

Shirley MacLaine: 6 Oscar nominations with a win for Terms of Endearment, 20 Golden Globe nominations with 7 wins including Best Newcomer in 1955 & the Cecil B DeMille Look Alike Award. 14 books, all best sellers. Her brother is Warren Beatty. They have never worked together, but that is something I would pay to see, especially if they would play senior citizen lovers. She talks to her dog- Terry & her dog talks back. My favorite MacLaine role – Doris (a thinly disguised Debbie Reynolds) in Post Cards From The Edge.

Barbra Streisand: 5 Oscar nominations with 2 wins, including one as a composer, 16 Golden Globe nominations with 8 wins including the Cecil B DeMille Look Alike Award. 8 Grammy Awards, & one of only a handful of performers to have an Oscar, Emmy, Tony & Grammy on their mantle, & the only artist to have a #1 Album in 5 different decades. Her son-in-law is Josh Brolin. Last year she wrote a frightening coffee table book about her questionable interior designing taste. She gave her very cute son-Jason Gould a role in the underrated Prince Of Tides.  She talks to her dog- Sammy. My favorite Streisand role- Doris in The Owl & The Pussycat.

They share a birthday today- April 24th. MacLaine turns 78 & Streisand, 70. Traditionally, they spend their birthdays together. I would like to be a fly on the wall at that party.