Lena Horne!
92!!
And we always thought she’d be around with us forever.
Oh, well … there are always her recordings, my favorite of which contains a poem very few of us know.
It was written by Ogden Nash.
“An American poet known for his light verse” is how Wikipedia has re-introduced Nash to us.
With the sublime, musical setting that Vernon Duke put this Lena Horne classic into … well … we shake our head a bit at the “light verse” notion, the aftertaste of Roundabout is, in its hidden ways, so searing.
Mike Renzi’s piano accompaniment behind her is, as always, its own taste of divinity.
The album, LENA HORNE, subtitled The Men In My Life, and featuring a duet with Sammy Davis Jr. is, as far as I know, tragically out of print.
Try to run one or two down for yourself.
Roundabout is, among all the bric-a-brac of life, a priceless slice of humanity at its penetratingly sardonic best.
Here is Ogden’s Nash’s indelible definition of Roundabout:
When you look life in the face
There’s too much time, there’s too much space!
There’s too much future, too much past!
Matters so little and the world so vast!!
You may think of yourself as an immortal creature
But you’re just a cartoon
Between a double feature!
You go roundabout
And roundabout
And roundabout you go!
For an olden spell
Is wound about the Game!
Then it’s ring around
And swing around your partner as you go,
But the more they change
They more they are the same.
When the dancing is done
You are back where you started.
When the music begins
It plays the same old tune!
You go roundabout
And roundabout
And roundabout once more!
As you pray again
Each day again to soar!!!!
On your way again,
It’s roundabout once more.
I remember the names
Of childhood games
We played in the setting sun:
Hide ‘n Go Seek
And Blind Man’s Bluff
And Run Sheep, Run!!
The older I grow the better I know
That lovers are kids at play,
But I am forever
The last one in
When my lover has run away!
You go roundabout
And roundabout
And roundabout once more,
As you pray again
Each day again
To soar!!!!!!!!
On your way again
It’s roundabout
Once more!!!!!!!!!
I attended Lena Horne’s appearance on Broadway with my son Matthew who was perhaps five or six at the time. I was not going to lose this opportunity, this gift to my son of a priceless memory.
I myself had been given one by my own father when he took me at about the same age to hear the great Art Tatum.
The owners of the bar would not let me in. I was obviously too young.
My father and I stood just outside the front door, in the rain, and tried, as best we could, to hear the limitlessly rich and miraculous variations on any and every theme by Art Tatum.
In the same spirit I took my son Matthew to experience the Divine Lena Horne.
“Matthew,” she said as we spoke to her after the show, “I saw you in the third row! You were asleep!!”
Matthew’s face pouted slightly as he huddled next to me.
“I would,” she added with one of her grandest smiles, “have done the same thing at your age!”
Such brushes with divinity are beyond unforgettable.
They are the more than Ordinary Miracles of life.
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