Quote of the day:

When I was born I was so surprised I didn’t talk for a year and a half.
—Gracie Allen

Last summer—and by “last summer” I mean the summer of 2024, not this past summer, but you know, the summer of last year, but that’s a rather ambiguous phrase and different folks ascribe different meanings to it, so anyway—in the summer of 2024 I noticed something interesting in the vamp of the song “Our Time” from the musical Merrily We Roll Along by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim. To the best of my knowledge, nobody had ever pointed it out previously, even though Sondheim’s songs have been analyzed and re-analyzed to within an inch of their lives.

It’s possible, of course, that somebody, somewhere, has pointed it out, as I haven’t seen every analysis of Sondheim’s work, but even if someone has, it doesn’t seem to be well known. So I decided to make a short five minute video.

Except— 

If you were reading this blog last summer—meaning during the summer of 2024—then you may recall that that was the summer of my discontent—the time of the incessant hammering and other loud noises coming from the neighbor who was having a third story added onto her house. I had no sooner formulated the idea of making a video when the hammering started up, and I realized that making a video where I’d have to provide narration (with the cacophonous hammering obbligato) was out of the question, so I quickly lost interest in the project.

But not completely.

I eventually did record the narration for the video and over the last couple weeks I cobbled something together, but I’ve never been able to regain that initial enthusiasm for the project that I had last summer. The only reason that I was able to force myself to put something together now is the looming release of the movie version of the recent Broadway production of the musical featuring Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff, and Daniel Radcliffe. That gave me something of a deadline to work towards.

So here it is.

It’s not bad, but I’m not entirely happy with the way it turned out, especially my narration. But I’m tired of tinkering with it. It’s about eight and a half minutes long, not the five originally envisioned. Inflation, I guess.