Just a Broadway Baby

With this being my only day off this week, I spent most of the day running errands. I did my laundry in the morning. Dolores was finishing off hers and Uncle Ken's laundry. He's supposed to go in for surgery for his cancer tomorrow. God, I hope he's ok. I'm really worried about him. I've always liked Uncle Ken. He's such a sweetheart. Dad was just watching his perpetual 24 hours of horror and spooky mysteries on the Chiller cable channel. It was such a nice day, I went out for a short walk around Oaklyn and Audubon, stopping briefly at the Oaklyn Library.

After I came in from doing the laundry, I had lunch and headed out again, this time over to the Haddon Township Library for my weekly volunteering session. It was busy when I arrived, and there were huge stacks of books and DVDs to be put away. I spent most of the time I was there shelving DVDs and children's books. I did finally take out the newest Strawberry Shortcake DVD, "Happily Ever After," and a PBS documentary mini-series, Broadway - The American Musical. I'd read the huge coffee table book of that title, but never saw the documentary it was based after. I made a few very brief stops at AC Moore for Valentine's decorations and Dollar Tree for cards before heading home.

Spent the rest of the evening making Batter Corn Bread (which came out quite well) and watching the DVDs I took out of the library. As you can probably guess from the title, the Strawberry Shortcake disc is that show's second DVD covering fairy tales. The first is their take on Sleeping Beauty, in which Strawberry uses the famous story of the girl who is put to sleep by a vengeful fairy to try to patch up a fight between her friends Angel Cake and Rainbow Sherbet. Rainbow gets a rare chance at the spotlight in an imaginative version of Rapunzel. Here, "Rap" is a tomboy who would rather be commanding sailboats than ruling a kingdom, but her teacher (Sour Grapes) wants her to become a real lady. I like the variation on the usual "be yourself" theme in the second - you don't need very long hair or fancy dresses to be a real princess or a real ruler. There's also a nice subplot on the necessity of education...and it's interesting to see this is the second episode (after Let's Dance) where Sour Grapes is a teacher who softens to the girls.

Broadway is absolutely fascinating. Like the Ethan Mordden books, it covers the history of the Broadway musical from the beginnings of the Ziegfield Follies (and revues in general) and George M. Cohan around the turn of the 20th Century to the creation of Wicked, the then-newest musical hit. While I already knew about a lot of what's covered here (Ziegfield and the Follies, Fanny Brice, Cohan, Marilyn Miller, Show Boat, Ethel Merman, "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?", Irvin Berlin, Cole Porter and Anything Goes), the one thing I didn't know much about was black performers. It was interesting to hear about Follies star Bert Williams (and realize I've known his theme song, "Nobody," since childhood), Ethel Waters, and early black shows like Shuffle Along.