Cinderella Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Impossible/It’s Possible

Lesley Ann Warren

Back on March 8th, one of my pastors gave a sermon about the loaves and fishes. After reading Mark 6:32-44, the pastor referred to the actions that seemed impossible. How could five loaves of bread and two fish feed 5000 men, not to mention women and children, with plenty left over? I’ve heard dozens of sermons on the topic, but this was a good one, truly.

Nevertheless, what sneaked into my mind was the song “Impossible/It’s Possible” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein television production of Cinderella. You may or may not know that there is a live 1957 version of Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews. I finally saw it on DVD, probably sometime in the early 2010s.

The one I remember, though, is from 1965 starring Lesley Ann Warren. There’s a scene in which Cinderella daydreams about going to the ball. Her fairy godmother (Celeste Holm), eventually joined by the title character, sang Impossible/It’s Possible. I saw that production broadcast so many times that the darn lyrics are stuck in my brain.

But the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don’t believe in sensible rules
And won’t believe what sensible people say,
And because these daft and dewy- eyed dopes
Keep building up impossible hopes,
Impossible things are happ’ning every day!

Incontrovertibly true

So I told the pastor, who is a big fan of musical theater, that I was thinking about that song during the sermon, and then I shared the lyrics. A friend who was nearby said, “You have a LOT of stuff stuck in that brain of yours!” This is incontrovertibly true, and denying it would be foolish.

I remember this in part because I had a big crush on Lesley Ann Warren at the time. But Impossible/It’s Possible is not even my favorite song in the show. That would be In My Own Little Corner:

In my own little corner,
In my own little chair,
I can be whatever I want to be.
On the wing of my fancy
I can fly anywhere
And the world will open its arms to me.

The 1997 adaptation, starring Brandy and featuring Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother, was impressive. But it’s often the first version of a musical or song that sticks in the brain and/or the heart.

Listen to:

Impossible/It’s Possible

In My Own Little Corner

Lydster: Echolalia

the most hunted person

My daughter suggested that perhaps I have echolalia. What is that? “Echolalia is the repetition of words or phrases spoken by someone else. Children use echolalia as they learn how to communicate. It usually resolves by age 3, but may be a sign of developmental delay or an underlying condition if it continues or appears during adulthood. It’s common with autism spectrum disorder and Tourette syndrome.”

My daughter has a friend who is self-described as experiencing echolalia. But the situation where she attributed it to me doesn’t track. She or my wife said something about an Impossible Hot Dog my daughter was having for dinner. Naturally, I responded, “And four white mice could never be four white horses. ” It’s a non-repetitive response.

I’ve been doing this for decades. When my mother would request, “Help me,” I might reply, “And I do appreciate you being ’round.” It was usually a musical lyric response to a Beatles or Motown lyric.

Over the last quarter century, it tended to be more likely a musical, such as West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Hamilton, or a song from Rodgers and Hammerstein. The above reference is to the song Impossible from R & H’s television production of 1965’s Cinderella.

So I’m not buying the echolalia diagnosis.

Game on!

Still, she is very bright. My wife and I were doing the NYT Connections on June 26, and our daughter connected Lovelace, Bojack, McQueen, and Hawking as words with playing cards as the second syllable. We all knew instantly it had to be the purple (most difficult) answer, and it was.

Right before that, the Final JEOPARDY response popped up. In the category 20th CENTURY FIGURES: Ironic in light of her name, she was remembered in a eulogy as “the most hunted person of the modern age.”

One contestant replied (Who was) Sanger, presumably Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement. One wrote Found, but Ken Jennings declared, “I’m afraid there’s no such person” (as Hunted and Found). The third player had no answer, but with a locked game, didn’t need to.

I was thinking of someone like Mata Hari, but my daughter immediately thought of Princess Diana; I had my doubts. But sure enough, Jennings noted, “If being hunted made you think of the goddess of the hunt, you might have thought of Diana, Princess of Wales.”

My daughter gleefully said, “You’d better put this in your blog!” I probably would have anyway…

Julie Andrews is 80

The Daughter thinks The Wife looks a bit like Julie Andrews from her Cinderella era, which pleases The Wife.

It is quite likely that the final episode of MASH that aired in 1983 was NOT the highest-rated non-sports television broadcast in United States history.

Some believe that the 1957 broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s CINDERELLA, starring a rising Broadway performer named Julie Andrews eclipsed it, with 107 million viewers in the US alone.

I watched Julie Andrews in a ton of television performances, including several with Carol Burnett. But it wasn’t until this century that I ever saw her in a movie, when the Daughter introduced me to The Princess Diaries and its sequel, on video. No, I saw parts of Victor/Victoria, but not enough to count it. I’ve also HEARD her in Shrek 2, Enchanted, and Despicable Me.

My Julie movie drought is odd because my mother had the soundtracks of both Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, which I grew up listening to. My current household saw Mary Poppins in December 2011, and The Sound of Music in the Fall of 2013. The Cinderella DVD was a 2009 family Christmas present; The Daughter thinks The Wife looks a bit like Julie from that era, which pleases The Wife.

My favorite Julie Andrews memory is an LP that came out in the mid-1960s. Back then, Firestone Tire Co. produced a new Christmas album every year, for sale at gas stations for a dollar. I STILL own an album featuring Julie Andrews.

Unfortunately, her gorgeous singing voice was wrecked by a throat operation in 1997, as she notes here, limited to a sing-speak kind of voice. She’s now concentrated on writing children’s books.

LISTEN TO:

Sings for King George VI in 1948 (Aged 13)

12 year old Julie Andrews~Polonaise; Je suis Titania – Mignon

In my own little corner -Cinderella

A Spoonful of Sugar – Mary Poppins

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious – Mary Poppins

The Sound of Music

My Favorite Things – “The Sound of Music”

Edelweiss -The Sound of Music (not the movie version)

The Bells of Christmas, noted at the time, correctly, as “one of the best new Christmas Carols to come along in years.”

Dear diary, my short summer staycation

I’ve come to the conclusion that people dis blogging, even when they don’t read blogs, because they believe it’s just a bunch of personal entries, as though it were some sort of public diary. While, I’ve usually attempted to give you a much more diverse and eclectic record, every once in a while, I need a journal entry, if only for ME to keep track of my activities six or sixteen months from now.

July 23: After work, I met The Wife and The Daughter at Albany’s Washington Park at for a free Park Playhouse presentation of the musical Singin’ in the Rain. The family didn’t get there until close to 6 p.m. for a 7:30 performance, and that’s too late. We found probably the last seats in the amphitheater, in the last row, far to the right, with some obstruction from one of the light poles. This was the antepenultimate performance, and it had reviewed well.

That said, the performance of the musical was quite fine. Great singing and dancing, even though only the guy playing Donald (the Gene Kelly role in the movie) was an Equity union actor. And, as advertised, there was actual singing, in the controlled “rain.” BTW, in case of real rain, the show might be postponed or even canceled. My friend Susan, who plays the oboe in the orchestra, and who the Daughter and I happened across at intermission, said only one show was canceled, though a couple were delayed over the four-week run.

The problem is that, because the stage gets wet, and has to get mopped up during the break, there’s not much story left afterward; a small complaint.

July 24: I took a day off from work, and we headed for the Albany Institute of History and Art. The baseball exhibit was also on its antepenultimate day on display. While the info on the major league teams was interesting, I was most intrigued by the local history. It showed the Capital District from our now-defunct minor league Yankees showcasing future stars such as Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams to the Albany Senators playing an exhibition game against Babe Ruth to the 1880s team in Troy that was a precursor to the San Francisco Giants.

After lunch, we went to the New York State Museum. There was an exhibit of art from students from the 64 education campuses comprising the State University of New York. There was also a fine display of photos and tools of the Shaker communities, several of which were around the area back in the religious organization’s heyday.

July 25: The folks putting on Park Playhouse had also produced a two-day run of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, with child and teen actors, at Albany’s Palace Theatre. This is the iteration in which Cinderella was played at various times by Julie Andrews, Lesley Ann Warren, and Brandy. I love this show, and this version was quite good, especially the title actress and the girl playing the herald.

However, because it was for free, and was presumably kid-friendly, parents brought their infants and toddlers, who couldn’t be still, or QUIET, for a 55-minute presentation, so it was occasionally difficult to hear. Outdoors, the noise may have been more diffused. Indoors, in the 2800-seat theater, at least 2/3s full, it was amplified.

July 26: I’ve previously touted the amazing work that happens on the very small stage of the Mac-Haydn Theatre, in Chatham, 45 minutes from Albany, where the entrances and exits become part of the set. My love for West Side Story is even more well established. This combination did not disappoint, from the very athletic mixing between the Sharks and the Jets, to the fine use of space to show Maria’s balcony.

The Wife thought the guy playing Tony was too pretty, though I disagreed. The problem with theater in the round, though, is that it may take a few seconds to find the highlighted action, such as when Maria and Tony first meet, and Tony is, for us, briefly obscured by the crowd at the dance.

What particularly worked for me was the Somewhere dance. Often a ballet that stops the action, it was quite effective with, e.g., “Anybodies”, the “tomboy” Jet dancing with Bernardo, the now slain Shark leader. Hey, maybe there IS “a place for us.”

And to nail that down, as we found our way to our car, we saw the actors playing Tony and Bernardo get in their vehicle and drive away together.

MOVIE REVIEW: Cinderella

The short before Cinderella was Frozen Fever, a sequel to the massively successful movie, with most of the original cast.

This was to have been a family outing a couple of weeks ago, to see the new live-action adaptation of the story Cinderella but we were all, in turn, under the weather. Finally, it’s school vacation week, the film is about to leave the Spectrum, so the three of us, plus a friend of The Daughter finally get to see this Disney film.

At some level, the Wife and I wish we had seen it sooner, for while it reviewed reasonably well (85% positive), it’s always the thumbs down that the mind remembers.

Truth is, I’m not sure we NEED another Cinderella film at all. Still, it looked quite fine, the sets, and lovely costumes, and the production design. Director Kenneth Branaugh does a decent job with pacing this. One of the better scenes was the deconstruction of the carriage, shortly after midnight.

One of the complaints was that there was a lot of death in this film. Hey, there’s ALWAYS death in a Disney film from Bambi’s mother to (Finding) Nemo’s mother. In fact, one gets to actually get to know Ella’s mother (Hayley Atwell, Agent Peggy Carter in the Marvel TV show), and feels sad when (CAN THIS BE A SPOILER?) she dies. Often in the Cinderella narrative, she’s quickly, or already, dead. This narrative was a good choice.

Her father (Ben Chaplin) spends enough time with his daughter (Lily James, Lady Rose MacClare from Downton Abbey) before he decides to remarry. Cate Blanchett is, unsurprisingly, masterful as the stepmother, and we get a sense of why she’s so wicked. Her daughters (Sophie McShera, Daisy Robinson Mason from Downton Abbey; and Holliday Grainger, who has played villains Lucrezia Borgia and Bonnie Parker) are far more ugly inside than out.

That Ella meets the prince (Richard Madden, Robb Starkin in Game of Thrones) before the ball makes the narrative less the “Suddenly, their eyes meet, and they fall in love” of other iterations. It’s a bit more empowering without being too heavy-handed.

My favorite character may be the captain of the guard (Nonso Anozie from Game of Thrones), but there were other nice performances, by Stellan Skarsgård as the Grand Duke, Derek Jacobi as the King, and especially Helena Bonham Carter as the somewhat dipsy Fairy Godmother. Oh, the mice were good too.

The short before the film was Frozen Fever, a sequel to the massively successful movie, with most of the original cast, but none of its joy, unless you like the one joke, which is about booger snowmen. I was going to say it left me cold, but I was forbidden from doing so.