Word: songful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Though they do not know it at first, they would be just as itchily and angrily at home nearly anywhere else as they are in dreary old Leipzig. Fries' hero, Arlecq, escapes to West Berlin in search of Oobliadooh, a storied dreamland delineated in song by Dizzy Gillespie, a prince of bebop. Sickened by the banalities of Communist bureaucracy, Arlecq looks forward to the delights of the West (or "the WEST," as he put it). When he finally does reach Oobliadooh, he finds things just as unsatisfactory as they were back home. "I must insist on a little more...
...mind. In other words, he jumps around a lot, such as when he demonstrates the ways of a fag judo instructor or a kiddies television show emcee. As this emcee, called Buttons and with a ludicrous costume to match the name, Buckman gets to lead the audience in a song that would make even Art Linkletter sneer. The lyrics are a sharp play on the worst genre of pop music ("I like to ride on a reindeer/Wouldn't you like to, too?/Wouldn't you like to hold the rein, dear, on my reindeer, dear?/It never rains, it only...
...winter again and the old refrains. Widener girls in turtlenecks. Papers getting done, not done, done. The heads make well-publicized voyages into Lamont. I sing on the street, badly, "Obladi, Oblada life goes on" but the song, the smile doesn't move your face toward a possibility, no, you're walking too fast, you're hurrying even as you race through this (On to the next paragraph, faster, faster) and you're changing my song. And so, from George Harrison: "I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping...
...hour before the men were due to land, Miramar's own marching band stepped up and began a series of hopelessly incongruous songs, like "Windy" or the Gillette Razor song. Midway into their third number ("The Girl Watcher's Theme"), the band stopped abruptly. Two planes were zooming in from the north; the crowd was suddenly silent and the families rushed up to the wire fence by the runway...
...floozy who befriends her, the gruff, tough director who puts her on at the last minute with those classic words: "It's a chance in a million, but it just might work." Everything else is there too-the whiplash body English and frenetic tap routines, the hard-times songs about riches-to-rags and good-times-acomin', the Spanish-town song ("Do you remember those nights of splendor"), the train song ("Clickity-clackity-woo-woo") and the rain song ("Pitter-patter-what's-the-matter...