Tuesday, July 19, 2011

& the Rest v the Prof & Mary Ann

When I put Isaiah to bed @ night, he always needs me to sing him a few songs. The problem w/ this is 2-fold. 1) I'm not very good @ singing... luckily, he doesn't know that. 2) My repertoire is pretty small. Going way back to when Solstice was a baby, my song choices have always included "City of New Orleans," "Tangled Up in Blue," Monkey & the Engineer," & "Ripple." That's really it... 4 options. Last spring, I decided to add "St. Stephen" & "Dark Star" to the mix, but as it turns out, "Dark Star" doesn't really work in that situation, & I always confuse the "St. Stephen" verses. Isaiah also enjoys a run-through of "Twinkle-Twinkle," "The Alphabet Song," or "Old McDonald." All of which are fine, but a tad on the boring side, so in a desperate move a few weeks ago, I added some old TV theme songs to the mix: "The Ballad of Jed Clampet," "The Good Ol' Boys," "The Brady Bunch," & "The Ballad of Gilligan's Isle."As it turns out, I have mixed feelings about "The Ballad of Gilligan's Isle." I always supported the the 2nd Season switch to include the Prof & Mary Ann as some sort of equality issue, but now that I've been singing it on a semi-regular basis, I understand the original lyrics. (Side note: a different song was used in the pilot episode, a song written by John Williams... yeah, that John Williams!) I guess it really comes down to the whole aesthetics vs politics debate. "& the rest" just fits better into the meter of the tune. As it stands, I've been switching back & forth from night to night (occasionally going w/ both). I'm really stuck here, & I think this is a much more interesting conundrum than the more traditional Ginger v Mary Ann debate. Although, for that one, I think I would resolve it the same way.

1 comment:

Kristin said...

I'd have to disagree with you. I think Prof & Mary Ann sounds better... Maybe it's the internal rhyme structure. Different aesthetics, I guess?

As a sidenote, I also sing Gilligan and Clampet to Desmond. :)