Sunday, September 30, 2007

High Society

Watching High Society from 1956 on TiVo. Wouldn't be bothering with it except that when it came out in 1956 I saw it in a movie theater in Cooperstown, New York. I was ten, and I was on the best vacation ever with my parents and brothers. We had spent a week at Lake George, water skiing and rowboating and adventuring, then we drove to Howe Caverns and spent the day being awed by stalactites and stalagmites and the impenetrable, frightening blackness of the underground river, then we drove to Cooperstown and toured the Baseball Hall of Fame, then we had dinner out in a fancy restaurant (any restaurant was fancy to us in those years) and then we went to see the movie, which had just opened. I loved it; we all did. The Cole Porter songs were bouncy and clever, Grace Kelly was beautiful, and witty lines and soul-satisfyingly big words were sprinkled throughout the script: "enervated"... "intolerable"... Wow. Very cool stuff.

Later on I learned that the real Bing Crosby was an abusive father and the real Frank Sinatra was a thug, and I saw The Philadelphia Story and watched real actors play their characters... Oh, well. Today I'm content to try to recapture the innocent fun that my ten-year-old self was having in 1956, on the best vacation ever.

(Oh, and right now they're playing our song: True Love, which Ada and I still sing together on road trips. Crosby and Kelly sang it better, but we have more fun, I think.)