Hello! This week, I saw a horse puppet so beautiful and realistic, it made me cry. Actually, puppets are somewhat of a theme in this week’s dispatch, because…?????? Let’s get into it!
I Finally Saw The Music Man, Thank You God!
For months, I’ve been trying to get tickets to The Music Man without leveraging a secret second mortgage against my parent’s house. Broadway shows are expensive, even the so-called cheap seats, but you can enter ticket lotteries or line up hours before box office opens to get rush tickets for a more reasonable price. The only trick is, you have to be ready to go see the show that day. I am a Person With Lots Of Plans, and I’ve been trying since March to get tickets to The Music Man, with no luck…
…until Wednesday, when I got a $49 orchestra seat, baby!!!
Ha-HA! Yes! Now, you might be wondering, Why did Hattie so desperately want to see The Music Man before it closes in January? I’m not the world’s biggest Music Man fan or anything. And I do not have strong feelings about Hugh Jackman, who plays Harold Hill in this run.
I care about Marian The Librarian Paroo, portrayed in this adaptation by Sutton Foster.
I’ve written about how much I adore and admire Regina Spektor, who is my favorite artist, musical or otherwise. Just below Regina is a very narrow tier of artists who I desperately wish to emulate, in some way. Maybe I want their skill set or maybe I just want their hair. Goldie Hawn, for example, or the poet Dora Malech. And then there is Sutton Foster, who is everything. She can sing! She can dance! She can act! She can do all these things so well you forget The Music Man takes place in Iowa (boring) in 1912 (mostly boring)!
I’d seen Sutton Foster live and in person previously, but not in a musical. It was just a book talk with Amy Sherman-Palladino, which was a fun event but didn’t prepare me for the scope of Sutton Foster’s musical talents.
When you see a celebrity in real life, sometimes, they just look like a normal guy. Other times, you see a celebrity, and you think, Oh, my God, a person can just look that way?! I had a similar reaction to hearing Sutton Foster sing live for the first time. She was perfect. Every time she was on stage felt like slow-motion. She was precise and exacting, but not robotic; she clearly loves what she does and understands she is meant to do it. It’s remarkably appealing to see that satisfaction up close.
In a certain song about a certain Wells Fargo Wagon, there were a horse puppet AND a horse costume that were so realistic, I could not believe my eyes. I actually thought the costume was a real horse onstage. The first time horseplay has moved me to tears.
I also learned mid-sixties women in New York looooooooooooooooove Hugh Jackman. He was a great fit for Harold Hill – very charming – but if he walked up to me on the street, I would not recognize him. He reminded me of a very handsome man I saw at the Cherry Valley Farm Supermarket in Astoria once, but did not titillate me further. However, my attitude may change as I mature. When he first appeared on stage, Hugh Jackman received a face-melting, screaming, standing ovation from his older female fans, including one woman who proceeded to stand in her seat after every song and bow down to him.
Where Are My Keys?
NPR ran a music feature this week about key changes. I came across the (very good!) article first on Twitter. “Many of the biggest hits in pop music history have a key change,” the outlet asked. “But these days they're rarely found. Where did they go?”
The simple answer: everyone’s a coward now.
Look, I’ll say what NPR skirted around but was reluctant to say outright. Every musical artist in this country knows we live in a post-Love On Top universe. And they’re scared. And they should be. Because there is absolutely no way a 2022 key change could make me feel the way these do:
As NPR points out, this song has four consecutive key changes, which are a nightmare on your vocal cords at karaoke but more effective than therapy if you can suffer through them with close friends in a private room. I think that some artists see this level of vocal control and raw talent and say Hey, you know what, I am good with a well-constructed bridge and a spoken word interlude. Yeah, we all have the same 24 hours in a day as Beyoncé, but she must spend them icing her larynx with a bag of frozen peas.
But I think a lot of contemporary music is cowardly. A lot of art and media is cowardly. We don’t have key changes for the same reason we have beige baby toys and monochrome “lounge” outfits and a lot of understated television shows about women and men in their early thirties refusing to talk about things. That’s not to say those things can’t be beautiful – I finally put together a “Christian Girl Autumn” brown monochrome outfit and it looked amazing! But aren’t they, you know. Boring?
Maybe I am just out of touch, not with today’s culture but with American culture as a whole. This is something I’ve noticed my whole life: I have a hard time finding value in things that aren’t a little gaudy, or goopy, or mortifying. Please, please, please, spare me your nuanced, restrained performances. I do not want a toned-down, muted cover of Dancing On My Own. I only want music that enters the last ninety seconds by making me feel like throwing myself off a cliff. I do not care how bad I sound when I scream along to it at Sing Sing Avenue A. If I wanted a safe, reliable choice, I would be at a car dealership, not a karaoke bar.
This whole conversation did make me remember something. I learned about key changes from a really weird song. If you aren’t a parent or a young millennial with strange fixations, you might not know who Sandra Boynton is. She is an author-musician who put out these book-CDs that are essentially storytelling musical revues. Young Hattie was particularly obsessed with Philadelphia Chickens, a book-CD combo featuring songs by Meryl Streep, Laura Linney, and the Bacon Brothers (Kevin Bacon and older brother Michael).
Later, Sandra Boynton released Dog Train, which includes a song by Kate Winslet featuring – ready? – Weird Al Yankovic. It’s called I Need a Nap. If you listen to it, you will sing it for the rest of your life, every time you are so tired.
I Need a Nap is where I learned about key changes. Because while it starts with lyrics like “I am mad and upset/What I want I don't get/I don't know what I want, anyhow,” the song becomes self-aware as it continues. You’ll see what I mean when you listen. And yes, there’s a key change. They just don’t make children’s ballads by Kate Winslet and Weird Al Yankovic like they used to!
A Dashed Dream Come True
Another big thing happened to me this week – and, yes, it’s puppet-related. For years, I have been trying to find a link to a video called Dot and Dash. I am pretty sure we got our VHS copy at a garage sale (sound off in the comments if you are my mom or dad and remember where this tape originated!). The “show” is actually a sequence of segments from a 1980s Canadian kids show called Gerbert, featuring two puppets named Dot and Dash who draw lines all over the place.
Every few months I do a cursory search for some variation of “canadian puppet dot dash kids show nostalgia educational gerbert” and hope to find it. For the first time, I have. In December of 2021, someone put it on YouTube, and now I can play in the background while I work.
Conspicuous (Media) Consumption
(Or: stuff I read/watched/did this week that I think you should read/watch/do)
If you don’t already love Sutton Foster, I recommend becoming obsessed with her the way I did: by listening to her 2011 concert at the Café Carlyle When I am singing show tunes alone in my shower, I am almost always imagining that I am giving an Intimate Evening Concert at the Carlyle, and that I get tired and take my heels off halfway through and banter with my pianist.
Sutton Foster also wrote a great memoir called Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life, which is why I saw her giving that talk last year. Like her, it is charming and touching and brilliant, and will leave you smiling through tears.
I’ve been brushing up on my Nora Ephron by lugging around a massive, two-pound compendium of her work. It’s called The MOST of Nora Ephron and, as advertised, it includes her journalism, her blog posts, her novel, Heartburn, and the screenplay to When Harry Met Sally. I’ve read a lot of this before, but I’ve been reading closely this time, annotating things to inspire me and things to blatantly emulate. If you’re a writer of any capacity, or love a writer of any ability, you should brush up on your Nora Ephron. It looks like Bookshop doesn’t carry the massive, deckled-edge version of The MOST of Nora Ephron I own, but I linked to a variety of her (more portable, more affordable) novels, screenplays and anthologies in my December Book Recommendations page.
I just want to tell you about Puppet SunSun. He is a puppet. He is on Twitter. Every day I go to his Twitter and I watch a lot of his videos, which are usually under ten seconds. Most of them involve the camera slowly zooming in on an item, then revealing Puppet SunSun is behind it. He makes a face and says something cute, normally the name of the item he is sitting on. For example: potato!!! He seems to be having a great time.
What I Did Not Buy This Week
This Johnson’s Cottontouch baby oil cream. I am buying the normal lotion, because this stuff smells better than any scented body product you can find aimed at grown-ups. But I’m skipping the “creamy oil” formula, as tempting as it is. I like my body oil to be runny and slippery and dangerous. I want to feel like I am marinating the steak that is myself.
A tattoo with this tattoo artist, Dieken, who has the cutest style I have ever seen. I am so dreadfully jealous of people who have their tattoos. Should I get a whole sleeve of baby animals? Sound off in the comments if you are NOT my mom and dad (JK please tell me you’ll still love me if I come home covered in sweet little lambs and pandas and pastel kittens)!
These reversible earrings, because they went out of stock. I saw some cute Madewell huggie earrings that were a whopping hundred-something US dollars, which is stupid. If it can be ripped out of my head by an infant, it is not worth more than twenty dollars. And, if I had them in one metallic, I’d also want them in the other. So, instead, I started searching for a reversible silver and gold pair. I saw some very cool ones all over the internet, but none were in my price range. I decided to get two cheap pairs of huggie earrings, when I remembered I had unused Amazon credit. So, I found two pairs of earrings, the exact size/style I wanted, and after applying my credit, only paid $0.59!
I did not buy fried cheesecake…yet. My friend Tara and I were going to order it, and then we realized the delivery fee was $20 because we were accidentally looking at a restaurant across state lines. If anyone has tried Adrian’s Fried Cheesecake in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, please let me know!
I did not purchase, but do intend to DIY, this disco strawberry:
And that’s all for this week’s dispatch! Go ahead and mark your calendars for Monday, when I shall return with poetry exercises. See you soon!
Oh Hattie! We must karaoke together!! I love singing (and songwriting, aka poetry) and always dreamed of being a singer/songwriter but never had the self-esteem to try it as a career. So, I dabble, as a hobby, in both singing and writing poetry that sounds like music in my head.
Regina Spektor is also one of my ultimate favorite artists! I love her album from 2006, BEGIN TO HOPE. It doesn't get any better than "Better," or "Fidelity," or "Hotel Song," and "Samson." There's something about everything she does that plucks at my soul. I've never sang any of her songs at karaoke, but I'd love to try. I'm going to read your story you wrote about her because I probably feel the same way.
My go to artists when I take the mic are The Cranberries, Poe, Fiona Apple, Dido, Natalie Merchant, and Tori Amos. If Tia is with me, we love to do some country duets ;-) She and I used to go to karaoke as our mother-daughter weekly bonding/escape from reality time when she was in high school. I miss that terribly.
I am so intrigued by your description of Sutton Foster. I love watching Broadway musicals and that feeling you get when someone is so amazing sticks with you forever! I feel so fortunate to have seen my favorite musical, Cabaret, on Broadway. I had taken my parents to NY and through an "industry acquaintance" got amazing seats at one of the little round speakeasy tables that made you feel like you were literally in the play. Soooooo good!
Thanks for the Regina reminder. She'll make the perfect companion as I'm driving around town today!