The teaser for the PG Tips ad I posted a couple of weeks ago:
I am hopeful that regualr posts will resume soon. This blog is far from dead. It’s just resting.
March 27, 2009
March 17, 2009
St. Patrick’s Day
This morning, while I was doing my part to get everyone up and out of the house, I found myself singing a song. It is a song that I learned many years ago, and now only fragments of it remains. The song was called “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder,” and I learned it in 5th Grade at St. Vincent de Paul School in San Francisco, which I attended for 4th and 5th grades.
The school had a tradition of holding a concert on St. Patrick’s Day that featured the 5th Grade croaking out various tunes, most of which were alleged to be Irish but were, in fact, written in places like Chicago and New York. We spent the entire year leading up to it learning “Mrs Murphy,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “Danny Boy” (the only one that had an Irish pedigree), and some others. I don’t remember the teacher’s name, but she was a nun (technically a sister since she wasn’t cloistered) and didn’t seem to be too happy about it. I remember her as being wide and bulldog-like. She had a face like a female version of the guy who played Cheswick in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, only meaner. But she loved music.
She taught us both geography and music, and while I don’t remember much of what she taught us in the former, I remember quite a bit of what we learned in the latter. And that St. Patrick’s Day was memorable, if nothing else, just for the size of the audience. The school had a rather sizable gym, which had the mandatory proscenium stage at the far end. We were seated in gray metal folding chairs arranged as a block. What sense this made, I don’t know. As I recall, I was about three ranks deep.
At the appointed time, the curtains were drawn and we were treated to the sight of a large gymnasium that was packed to the rafters. Of course, the rest of the student body–seven grades’ worth of students–was there, as were the teachers and the staff. On top of that, there were hundreds of parents. (More grades than the 5th must have been performing that day, but I remember them not.) I was told that my father would be there somewhere, but, scan the crowd as I did, I never saw him.
And we sang.
I’ve always enjoyed singing, sometimes to the dismay of those around me, and that day was a triumph for me. I sang loudly and with enthusiasm these songs that I knew were mostly terrible and sentimental. And yet I liked “Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder.” A good song for a ten-year-old. And after all these years–almost 40–I still remember most of the first verse and the chorus.
Just in case you’re curious, here’s a recording of someone singing it long before I did, courtesy gutenberg.org:
March 9, 2009
Homage
It’s been a long time since I’ve really watched Morecambe and Wise. After the unexpected success of The Benny Hill Show here in the States around 1980, other British sketch shows started popping up on PBS and some of the independent stations. Dave Allen at Large popped up on Channel 38 in Boston, and Morecambe and Wise was shown on some station that I no longer, unfortunately, remember. I don’t think Morecambe and Wise ran very long, though, despite it being an extremely funny show. It more or less fell off the radar screen for me until the rise of YouTube.
And then, this past weekend, my wife informed that PG Tips had a new commercial that I should watch, which turned out to be a tribute to a famous Morecambe and Wise sketch. Here’s the original:
And here’s the commercial for PG Tips, in which Johnny Vegas shows himself to be something of a nifty dancer:
And now I must put myself to the task of finding more Morecambe and Wise. Here’s to Eric and Ern. You left it a better place than what you found.
