I COULD HAVE ROMANCED ALL NIGHT….

I could have….that is, if I were fifty years younger. But why bemoan it if Mother Nature no longer shores up the animal in me? Still, she’s no spring chicken herself, so you’d think she’d cut old geezers like me some slack.

Moving on from my love life of fond memory: Wouldn’t it be loverly if I instead celebrated the 164th birthday of my near-contemporary George Bernard Shaw with a selection of songs from MY FAIR LADY (based on his play PYGMALION), followed by a bit of biography, a serving of Shaw quotes, and a nightcap of Shavian brew-haha.

From “Wouldn’t It Be” to “I Could Have”….

In this scene, Stanley Holloway is seen lifting his spirits on his last night of ‘freedom’:

Next in line, the bit of bio:

https://www.biography.com/writer/george-bernard-shaw

Now sink your teeth into the quotes:

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

There is only one sort of genuine Socialism, the democratic sort, by which I mean the organization of society for the benefit of the whole people.

We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists.

….which leads us to the brew-haha / brouhaha between Shaw and fellow socialist H.G. Wells (click on the title below the cartoon caricature):

….which takes us at a social difference to

THE END

BETTER HATE THAN NEVER

It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something. –Samuel Butler

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Eight days from today, much of the civilized world will celebrate Valentine’s Day. Between now and then, the candy kiss and chocolate industry will make nothing short of a mint, selling sweet somethings to buyers to treat lovers….what some might call a vast capitalist conspiracy to take advantage of the lovesick. I* call it, “Bah! Humbug! A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every 14th of February!”

Therefore and mean-while, I’m proposing to you the need for a date — a day to counterbalance that upcoming day of over-commercialized romance and mushy love with a date which celebrates its opposite: hot-blooded, hard-boiled HATE. And what better way to inspire a hateful frame of mind than appropriate mood music:

*and Ebenezer Scrooge

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Still not feeling the hate? All right, ladies, repeat after me: I Hate You, Darling….

However, being the sensitive soul that I am, I’d rather you not hate me personally. So let’s broad-en the scope and close on this e-gal-itarian note:

Hold on. We can’t close without a name for this hate date. Down With Love Day? Cupid Sucks Day? Miss Ogamist Day? Better Hate Than Never Day? Wait a sec — now we’re back where we started.

This is the end.

 

THE KISSING POST

I am in favor of preserving the French habit of kissing ladies’ hands–after all, one must start somewhere. –Sacha Guitry, French actor, playwright and film maker

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The title of today’s post is THE KISSING POST– not to be confused with THE HITCHING POST, which would be a post about the ceremony of getting hitched (after kissing went to the hand-kisser’s head). Alternatively, THE HITCHING POST could be a post about a post to which you tether your horse….as opposed to your spouse (pardon my horse play).

Be that as it may, it may interest you to know that anthropologists believe kissing is a learned behavior. But they believe above all in science, so what competence could anthropologists possibly have in the field of kissing….with the likely exception of Parisian anthropologists, who are said to have French kissing down to an art….in the interest of science? C’est une bonne planque!*

Knowing that many of my readers are serious about science, you would no doubt like to know where I came up with what “it may interest you to know” — so, just so you know:

https://people.howstuffworks.com/kissing2.htm

As for the romantic barbarians among you, far be it from me to kiss you off. Kiss on!

*Nice work if you can get it!

ANGELS HAVE EYES

ANGELS HAVE EYES

“Sex is sacred,”
some humans say —
but they still do
it anyway.

Why they do so
beats us above….
They’re not, you know,
so easy to love.

Yet angels know
man needs no shove,
dreams you’d be so….
How does it go?

Oh, yes! It’s — so….

 

SPRING CLINGING

There’s something bad in everything good: when spring comes, can spring cleaning be far behind? — Evan Esar

Spring has come, but in my sequestered domain, this doesn’t mean spring cleaning must follow. Though my closets be crammed and my drawers be loaded — make that cluttered — I’ll have no problem leaving spring cleaning far behind (even if others stink otherwise).

Now, I’m not saying that spring cleaning doesn’t have its place. For example, it might be worth the bother if you’re young and in love:

Speaking of “young love,” how old do you think the above song is? If you guessed it dates back to the ‘Golden Age’ of popular music (1920s, 30s, 40s), welcome to one of my happy places. If you’re thinking I’m clinging to the best of those romantic old songs out of naught but nostalgia, nothing could be further from the youth — my guileless youth that Father Time gradually re-placed. But suppose the mature me were unable to relate to the ever-young work of, say, Twain, Stevenson and Swift — it wouldn’t be that their writing has become outdated.  I would simply have lost the capacity to appreciate its timelessness.

In like manner, whether it be seen as ‘gilding the lily’ of youth or burnishing the harmony of maturity, I still think of the oldies as younger than springtime….and on that note, I’ll tune out:

 

ALL’S FARE IN LOVE AND FOUR

With my mind drawing blanks and little time to spare
….as this post comes due, I hope you will bear
with four poems previously published, not saying where….
but near in spirit to my last post’s bill of fare:

LOVER BOY

Narcissus was too perfect for sex or pelf;
He longed only to gaze in love at himself….
The moral of which is that, even in myths,
Too much reflection may be your nemesis.

THE BOOK OF WISDOM

Thou shalt not commit adultery,
Nor shalt thou covet thy neighbor’s spouse.
Shouldst thou succumbeth to temptation,
Thou shalt not covet in thy neighbor’s house.

FAIR WARNING

And so, when wise men say to you
Love’s a game for dreamers and fools….
Buddy, beware
That a lady fair
Doesn’t play by the wise men’s rules.

TREASURE CHEST

\/    Madame’s cleavage so fair; yet
xx    he must pretend not to see;
~~   he knows well the song:
/\    Let it be; Let it be.

She may say, if he peeks,
he’s just looking for thrills….
but innocence is a broad, and she
gets There’s ogle in them thar hills.

ROMANCE WASN’T BUILT IN A DAY

To a romantic girl, all roads lead to Romeo. –Evan Esar

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August is ROMANCE AWARENESS MONTH. I’m not sure why a month is needed to raise awareness of romance (a week, or even a day, seems more than sufficient to awaken all but the most world-weary of libidos)….however, if it must take a month, I suppose August will do as well as any other. But then who needs Valentine’s Day  — enough is enough!

That may sound tantamount to telling Cupid to take a hike, but before you Romeos and Juliets go Roman off in a huff, be aware I have nothing against romance so long as it doesn’t get out of hand….which, as it happens, makes the title of my previous post (DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD) appear as if I’d simultaneously had today’s post in mind. Alas, I am not that far-sighted, but as a killer of two birds with one stone, and as a preview of coming attractions, I must admit the title was prescient (and I assure you that the two birds killed weren’t lovebirds).

Anyway, what can I say about romance that hasn’t already been intimated by many others? Not much, I’m happy to say, because it comports with my creative energy level in these dog days of August. Therefore, I shall turn to those others who have already waxed eloquent about puppy love and the like, and relieve myself of further arduous cogitation:

Love is the emotion that a woman always feels for a poodle, and sometimes for a man. –George Jean Nathan

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love. –Disraeli

Marriage is a romance in which the heroine dies in the first chapter. –Cecelia Egan

This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken. The doc says, Well, why don’t you turn him in? And the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. I guess that’s how I feel about relationships. They’re totally irrational, crazy and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs. –Woody Allen

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties. –Jules Renard

The realist always falls in love with a girl he has grown up with, the romanticist with a girl from “off somewhere.” –Robert Frost

Fools rush in where bachelors fear to wed. –Evan Esar

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. Women have a more subtle instinct: what they like is to be a man’s last romance. –Oscar Wilde

By the time you swear you’re his, shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is infinite, undying —
Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying.
–Dorothy Parker

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy. –Henry Kissinger

In as much as we began this romantic excursion with several punning allusions to Rome, it seems fitting to close with scenes from one of my favorite films, the Audrey Hepburn-Gregory Peck romantic comedy, ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953):

OF LOVERS AND LEAPERS

On Leap Day (Feb. 29), according to an ancient Irish custom, a woman is permitted to propose to a man, who must accept, or pay a penalty. Thus, being of part-Irish descent, my thoughts this day turn — or should I say, leap— to love. Ah, L’AMOUR! Ah, LAMOUR (Dorothy Lamour, that is — she of silver screen memory and part-Irish descent). Sure, and I  still don’t know why she didn’t propose to this dear boy back in those saronged “ROAD” movie days, being as close as the first row of the darkened theater, and I only 22 years younger than she. When love dreams have gone so cruelly unrequited, ’tis THE END OF THE WORLD — one might just as well d(r)ive off a suitable cliff. For example:

Click LOVE ROCKS

Now, if I were a cynic, I might postulate that the daring young man in the flying machine was under the influence of something more substance-tive than love that didn’t click. But this happened in the hallowed Hannibal of our beloved Mark Twain, who coincidentally wrote of a Lover’s Leap called Maiden’s Rock (named for a beautiful Sioux maiden) in his book LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI….so let us not jump to judgment.

Maiden’s Rock and the Lover’s Leap in Hannibal are, of course, but two of many such sites in America and beyond (including one of legendary leaps from a rocky waterfall on the Glencree River, County Wicklow, Ireland). If your love dreams are on the rocks and you’re thinking of taking the plunge, but don’t know where you’d make the biggest splash,

look here BEFORE YOU LEAP

On a happier note, Feb. 29 is a good day to be born because your birthday only comes around every four years. That may put a serious crimp in the number of birthday presents you get, but who wouldn’t exchange that shortfall for quadruple the longevity? I’ll admit I don’t personally know anyone who’s lived to near age 400, probably because such persons cheat and celebrate their non-leap year birthdays on Feb.28 or March 1. Oh, well — who can blame them for not wanting to depend on Depends for the last 300 years of their lives?

But I do know of some of the statistically 1 in 1461 people born on Feb. 29 — people like Jimmy Dorsey, the 1930s-40s Big Band leader; Dinah Shore, the 1940s band vocalist and 1950s-60s TV & recording star; and Michèle Morgan, a French actress who came to the U.S. when Germany invaded France in 1940, and returned after the war. Though little known outside France, she has the distinction of having played opposite Frank Sinatra in his first starring role in the film Higher and Higher (1943), and she almost landed the female lead in Casablanca opposite Humphrey Bogart, but RKO wouldn’t release her to Warner Bros. for the sum of money offered. She is still with us on this, her 96th birthday.

Should we end where we started, leaving the dashed dreams of life and romance on the precipice, as lamented here by Karen Carpenter (born March 2nd)? Don’t they know it’s THE END OF THE WORLD?

Or, should we get a grip, and tell February 29 to take a flying leap? Forward, March!

 

FOR DON, THE LATIN LOVER

My good buddy, New Yorker Don Frankel, stated today that he’s into Latin mottos lately (see comments to yesterday’s It’s Girl Scout Cookie Time post under Speak Without Interruption, which you can access and click via the Blogroll in the right column).

Don doesn’t say exactly why the sudden interest in Lingua Latina. Perhaps this beautiful weather we’ve been having lately has him thinking thoughts of spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to amare, and an old man wishes he were young again (not that Don is old, but why wait until the last minute). The time to start practicing those Latin pickup lines is now, because you never know when you might run into a fellow lover of Latin in Manhattan who’s not a fellow.

So, here we go, Don. Start memorizing these now, and before you know it, the feminas will be flocking around you like a reincarnated Rudolpho Valentino:

Nonne alicubi prius convenimus?
Haven’t we met somewhere before?

Apparet te habere ingenium profundum.
You strike me as a very deep person.

Credo fatum nos coegisse.
I think fate brought us together.

Romani quidem artem amatoriam invenerunt.
You know, the Romans invented the art of love.

Apudne te vel me?
Your place or mine?

O Deus! Plus! Perge! Aio! Hui!
Oh God! More! Go on! Yes! Ooh!

Non sum paratus me committere.
I’m not ready to make a committment.

Spero nos familiares mansuros.
I hope we’ll still be friends.

Likewise.