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Smol daughter was sound asleep when I left Thursday morning to take smol son to kindergarten. He wanted to know what kind of car we had, because something they are doing in his class is having the children ask each other questions -- which I love, it is building conversation skills and encouraging them to find out more about the details of their lives that they had not articulated before. So far he has come home wanting to know what our cats eat, if our house is really 4 stories (no, it's a split-level, so it has 4 levels but only 2 stories -- he didn't like that answer, he said he'd keep saying 4 stories), and what kind of car we have. The car discussion on the way to school led to talking about how one can recognise different kinds of cars, which is not something I am skilled at, but there are a few types I can recognise easily (VW bugs both old and new, the Prius) and so we talked about those and how some cars are rectangles and some are more round and so forth. I love these sorts of conversations where I need to really think about how I think about something and talk about it in a very basic way, then build from there. It is another one of the many joys of raising children, the ways that they challenge me to see and hear and think newly about the most ordinary parts of my life.
Driving home from drop off on Thursday I was listening to Bernadette Peters and Scott Bakula (yes, I know) in a concert version of Anyone Can Whistle from 1995. It is the 'new' version of the show to me; even though I only started listening to Sondheim in the early 1990s, I imprinted on all the recordings that were available at the time and everything since is 'new'. But what I was thinking about, listening to it, is how isolated Anyone Can Whistle seems, sitting there in 1964, sort of aware of all the societal discontents that were beginning to erupt into protest and change, but also sort of not -- there are the corrupt politicians and the thread of institutionalising anyone who doesn't conform, and inside that thread there are glances at racism and sexism, but it feels much more like part of the The Lonely Crowd/The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit examination of conformity than like something that is recognisably '60s'. I do know, of course, that it is all more complicated, and what I think of as '60s' is much more 'things which have come to symbolise the 1960s in the U.S. in my own mind' -- but still, this is what I was thinking. I really enjoy some parts of Anyone Can Whistle, but there is always an element of surprise for me that Hapgood, the wandering trickster hero, is a much-divorced adult man rather than a Long-Haired Youth.
Then I got home to find out Marin Mazzie had died and made the post about her, which led me to think about how different it is to simply be able to share the music itself. Our first decade of keeping online journals was pre-YouTube -- if I was talking about music I simply talked about it as best I could, and if someone was curious to hear it perhaps I made them a mix tape (!) or CD to share it with them, or they went out and bought the album themselves. I love the convenience of YouTube, but it is of course less intimate -- anyone reading this is free to go listen to the music, or not listen to it, there is not the need to make the connection and do the work to acquire it and such. I do not think this is a bad thing, all in all, but the difference did strike me.
