Prompt: "A song that you'd share with your grandmother"
Selected by Joe
"DK Rap"
George Andreas and Chris Sutherland
Donkey Kong 64 Original Soundtrack, 1999
I have one grandmother who is alive and another who is not. This prompt is hypothetical ("song you would share with your grandmother), so technically both are on the table. But I just sincerely cannot picture either grandmother, hypothetical or not, seriously listening to music. Like, if I played either one of them a song, it wouldn't even register for them. My paternal grandmother (who passed away seven or eight years ago) was caring to a fault, with that fault being that she didn't really have a personality beyond that immense and total focus on taking care of the loved ones around her. It's also pretty likely that I just missed the boat and that her interests in the arts were a lot richer before she was elderly. My maternal grandmother (who has made plenty of appearances on this blog and who now lives just around the corner from us) is... I'm going to be gentle today and just say that she has many great qualities but "good listener" is not one of them. I dutifully listen to her talking at me about things I don't understand and people I don't know, and I find it hard to imagine a scenario in which I tell her about a song and she does anything but respond by talking about something completely unrelated.
This says nothing about how supportive they both had and have been throughout my lifetime. That's wholly separate from whether they hear me. There's no responsibility to share art, but there's a familial duty to be there for each other. And so even though I can't remember for certain, I am 99% sure that they both attended a showing of La Salle College High School's Spring 2007 Musical, Babes in Arms. I played a character named Steve Edwards, and I had a small role that involved a little bit of singing. I wasn't good at singing and I wasn't really good at acting and really the only thing I was good at was the stage makeout I had with an actress whose IMDB credits currently include the movie Babylon. I haven't spoken to her in sixteen years and I'm sure if she knew I was writing about the Babes in Arms stage kiss on my public blog that I maintain in the year 2023 that she would feel physically ill. ANYWAY, my grandmoms were there, and so one of the possible choices for today's song could possibly be my short song from that play, since I literally shared it with them at one point in my life.
Have you ever heard of Babes in Arms? It's an old one. I certainly would have no idea of its existence had I not acted in it. I have never seen the screen adaptation, nor have I seen a copy of the script since high school, but I thought for sure that if I looked at a synopsis, or like a list of the songs, that I would be able to pick out my song. But then I visited the Wikipedia page for Babes in Arms, and the plot synopsis section looked like a completely different play. It was bizarre and unsettling, and it made me question my brain's ability to retain shit like that. There's a lot of mentions of race and communism and indentured servitude and fuck man I don't remember any of that. All I remember is that Babes in Arms was a shitty play about kids trying to save their farmhouse theater from being demolished. What the fuck?
Took me a while to pull the thread apart, but here's your answer: 22 years after the original 1937 production, playwright George Oppenheimer created a "sanitized, de-politicized rewrite" of the show. Wikipedia notes that this "newer" (in quotation marks because something created in 1959 is not new) version is the one that is more widely performed. "Widely" should probably also be in quotes, since who the fuck is performing Babes in Arms in the 21st century besides some hacks at La Salle College High School, as directed by a lady who had to shout directions from a La-Z-Boy recliner because she broke her leg, and who had just recently been banned from ever directing again at my then-future college, La Salle University, for having the gumption to direct a highly sexualized version of Pippin that her in twisted mind should take place on a golf course (nicknamed, according to my Masque elders, "Putt 'n' Smut")?
The worst part about the "rewrite" is that, despite it allegedly being more widely performed, it is completely absent from the internet. Note that the Wikipedia mentions it but does no legwork in providing a synopsis, which had to have been fiercely different from the 1937 version. My character of Steve Edwards isn't even mentioned, nor is he included in the character list. Is he still present but just under a different name? I have no idea! The two different versions are that different! No mention of a stage kiss anywhere in this fucking thing!!
I don't really have the patience to wrestle with the internet today, so let's bag the whole fucking idea. I'm embarrassed by the whole thing anyway. Babes in Arms, honestly, jesus fucking christ.
But I still need a song for today, so let's just put the most ridiculous thing I can think of up there, and assume that if I shared this with either of my grandmothers, that they would have no fucking clue what to do with it. Like, it's literally unfathomable. I could share fucking anything with them, though, and it would garner the same exact reaction each time, so why not share something stupid and inane and funny and absurd? "DK Rap" will do just fine.
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