Another me

Sometimes you just don’t know where it comes from.

Last night I attended a Frank Loesser musical retrospective at the 92nd Street Y. As both a lyricist and solo songwriter, Loesser contributed many tunes to the Great American Songbook during a career that spanned four decades (1930s to 1960s). His first big hit was the World War II era rouser, “Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition.” Other popular songs bearing his trademark wit and wordplay include “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” and the country-and-western ditty, “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.”

The evening’s host, Ted Sperling, said that Loesser alternated his time between Hollywood, working as a contract songwriter for films, and New York, where he composed the hugely successful Broadway shows Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Loesser was a cool and sophisticated cat, a decent singer and pianist himself, and when he wanted to he could swing like nobody’s business.

Never in a million years would I have guessed that the same guy behind “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” and “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” was also responsible for the 1952 big-screen musical, Hans Christian Andersen. The film starred Brooklyn-born David Kominski, or “Danny Kaye,” as the Danish author of19th-century fairy tales. Sperling noted that, upon hearing Loesser was selected to write the songs, Kaye’s wife, Sylvia Fine, jokingly referred to the project as “Hans Jewish Andersen.”

I remember seeing Hans Christian Andersen on TV when I was 5 or 6, and Ioving the songs. “Thumbelina” and “The Ugly Duckling” are tunes kids in their single digits would enjoy even today. The sublime beauty of “The Inchworm” impressed me as a tot, though I could hardly say I got what the lyrics were about. I guess I was a sucker for a haunting melody in three-quarter time.

As I said, I had no idea Loesser wrote the music for that film. And so the last thing I expected to hear last night was David Yazbek and Julia Murney’s fine, unadorned rendition of “The Inchworm.”

Murney began with the chorus:

Two and two are four
Four and four are eight
Eight and eight are sixteen
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two

At this point a very odd thing happened. I felt a tear on my face. What’s up with that, I thought.

Yazbek then sang the first verse:

Inchworm, inchworm
Measuring the marigolds
You and your arithmetic
You'll probably go far

Now the tears were running freely. I had everything to do to hide this display from the friends I was with. What the frig was going on? Fortunately the house lights were down.

Yazbek sang the second, and last, verse with Murney this time accompanying on the chorus:

Inchworm, inchworm
Measuring the marigolds
Seems to me you'd stop and see
How beautiful they are

Now some of you reading this may do an online search to get a taste of the song or refresh your memory. And hearing it you’ll probably think to yourself, what a sap. But the thing is, I’m really not sentimental. Like most other adults, time and experience have pretty well beaten that out of me. I can’t tell you why I cried, or where those tears came from. Maybe it was another me, reminding this jaded and middle-aged “sophisticate” that I was once a kid who was a sucker for haunting melodies in three-quarter time. I guess this time around, the lyrics sunk in.