Valentine's Day Playlist

Around Valentine's Day every year, I get this impulse to comb my music collection and construct a multitude of playlists. Bouncy, poppy love songs, crazy desperate breakup songs - romance is a fruitful topic for musicians and lyricists. This year, I hit on a previously unrealized subgenre that is actually ideal for the holiday: show tunes. Musicals are one place where wearing one's emotions on their sleeve is a necessity, and some fabulous love songs have been created for them. Here are some of my favorites:

A couple of years ago, I watched a documentary on Broadway musicals where they discussed Oscar Hammerstein's skill with what they described as the "speculative love song" - it allows the writers to place a love song for the romantic leads in the first act by talking about it as non-real. (I don't know, I thought it was interesting.) Anyway, here's some of my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein selections.

"If I Loved You" from Carousel

"People Will Say We're in Love" from Oklahoma

"Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" from Cinderella

"Ten Minutes Ago" from Cinderella

Let's just take a moment to bask in the very concept of a musical created specifically for television. The original version, from the 1950s and starring Julie Andrews, was filmed live. Live! A live original musical on television! When the fairy godmother gives Cinderella her new gown for the ball, they just sort of pushed Julie Andrews out of camera range and changed her clothes super-fast! It just makes Glee seem like they're not really trying very hard, doesn't it? The sixties version (with Leslie Ann Warren, up top) is the one I watched to death as a kid before misplacing the tape, the nineties version (with Brandy) resurrected the show in my mind, and the fifties version is the one for which I have the soundtrack. Really, I love all three because of songs like these.

"Make Believe" from Show Boat

This is actually Jerome Kern, not Richard Rodgers, but it still fits the whole Hammerstein speculative song thing. Oh, Show Boat. So deeply problematic, so academically intruiging.

And from other writers and shows:

"One Boy" from Bye Bye Birdie

Hugo is kind of a lame character (that whole super-chaste kiss sequence in the middle of this scene cracks me up), but I love how Bobby Rydell's voice sounds in this song. It makes early-sixties conformity sound so appealing.

"Someone is Waiting" from Company

Having had groups of close male friends, the whole conceit of wishing to pick and choose everyone's best parts to create someone ideal is so terribly spot-on.

"I Can Hear the Bells" from Hairspray

Hairspray always manages to have just the right amount of edge and humor in its songs, which acts as a buffer against what can be saccharine about them.

"Tonight" from West Side Story

Just so wonderfully swoon-y. I love "Somewhere," too, but this is my favorite.

V-Day

At the beginning of this month, I was talking to one of my friends about why I'm not particularly fond of February. In my personal history, not-so-great things have happened in February, and various depressing Valentine's Days of the past decade are a large part of that. One V-Day in particular stands out: seventh grade - the year when receiving obligatory valentines from your classmates was no longer. I was madly, unrequitedly in love with this boy, with whom I was friends as well, which was excruciating and terrible. Valentine's Day was on the weekend that year, so the last Friday beforehand was the big day for gift-giving at school. At lunch, one of my best friends received an elaborate gift from my crush - an ostentatiously large glass penguin accompanied by a note detailing how he found the penguin in Venice, "the city of love," and so on and so forth. The emotions that I most clearly recall are devastation, and then blind rage. Not only was this guy who I adored lavishing attention on someone who wasn't me, but she didn't even want it. The very worst part of the whole experience, though, didn't happen until I got home, after spending half of the day fighting valiantly against the torrent of tears pricking at my eyes. Being friends, he apparently thought he could call and pump me for information about her reaction to his gift. While I was twelve years old, and life-consumingly obsessed with this guy, I managed to evade the questions and I'm still proud that I didn't involve myself in some deeper, more messed-up adolescent shitshow.

This is where the story does a complete 180. Because after realizing that I wasn't giving anything away, he invited me to a movie that weekend. Not alone, mind you. In all of my similarly one-sided affairs, my luck has never really swung that way. It was among our group of friends, a bunch of guys who shared sharp wits, cynical senses of humor and eclectic tastes in...well, everything, I suppose. They were all at least a head taller than me, rare for middle school, and when we went to the movies, my mother said that she knew that she didn't have to worry about my well-being because they looked like my bodyguards. So, on the day that actually was Valentine's Day, we went as a group to see Patch Adams. (I know. Looking back, I saw some pretty mediocre movies with them - The World is Not Enough, Vertical Limit. The late-90s were not a great time if you were limited to PG-13.) Regardless, the fact that the movie was kind of terrible is insignificant.

I started detailing this V-Day as the worst Valentine's Day I've ever had, but I realized that it was actually the best. My friend who received the penguin? Ascended to the heights of middle- and high-school popularity and I never really thought twice about the loss. The boys, however, are a completely different story. They made me feel like good company, like a good person to be around on that Valentine's Day, which is more than I've felt on any of the V-Days that have followed. Of all the people who've popped in and out of my life in the past ten years, I think that I miss them the most. As we attended different high schools and took different paths, we lost touch completely, something I still deeply regret, even as an adult. It is shocking and bewildering to me that people we see every day for years can become strangers. Anyway, this V-Day, I'd like to send out a valentine to PB, MF, CG, RK and GP, wherever they are and whomever they're spending the day with. Thanks.