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To My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson, Who Shares His May 25th Birthday with My Dad; Or, Don’t Call Me a Person Of Color, I’m a Product Of Empire, 1

A POE. I like that.

“I Shall Return.” The Invasion of Lingayen Gulf (Paglusob sa Golpo ng Lingayen), was an amphibious operation in World War Two led by General Douglas MacArthur, 6-9 January 1945

My father—who was born near the beach where, thirty-nine and a half years later, MacArthur returned like he said he would (Lingayen Gulf, meeting place of the provinces Pangasinan and La Union)—made it to the US early in his adult life. How he actually made the journey has always intrigued me since no one in the family ever talked about it.

After looking at a Google map, I figured that if the Gulf were big enough to accommodate battleships in wartime, it would’ve been big enough to harbor smaller vessels in peacetime, like tramp steamers. Tramp steamers were easy to sign on to then, and even as late as the 1970s you could hop on, do a lot of dirty heavy work, then hop off at the first stop and hop on the next steamer going further. The trick back then was knowing the comings and goings of such short-run vessels which, as this was in the old days before comprehensive shipping news, you pretty much had to do by going in person right to the docks to find out.

There were two directions my dad could’ve taken, east or west. East would’ve meant hopping from steamer to steamer, wending his way through the islands and peninsulas of Indochina. West meant making his way down the coast of Luzon facing the China Sea, into Manila Bay, where if he lucked out he could sign on to one of the much larger, international, Pacific-crossing tramp steamers, like the Queenmoor out of Newcastle, UK. I’m inclined to think that’s the route he chose. Because, thanks to the Thomasite teachers sent by our American conquerors, Dad had one invaluable asset: He could speak the English language.

In either case, it still might’ve taken him as long as 6-8 months to reach San Francisco, which my mother told me was his first place of residence. So it happened that my father, Cenon Merto “Sam” Ramos, started his American life in the most evocative city in America—the home of fog, hills, sourdough, hashish, Dashiell Hammett, Harry Bridges, Mission Dolores, earthquakes, Chinatown, Manilatown, the DiMaggio boys, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (recording of Alfred Hertz conducting the SFSO in Wagner’s Parsifal here).

It was 1927. Dad was 22. 

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To My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson, Who Shares His May 25th Birthday with My Dad; Or, Don’t Call Me a Person Of Color, I’m a Product Of Empire, 2

The picture below is of the fourth anniversary banquet of the local Asinganian Club, November 1941, just two weeks before Pearl Harbor. That’s my dad, extreme right under the picture, when he still had hair.

Asinganian, I have to explain, means “of Pangasinan”, which is the province my father comes from—but it can be extended to also mean “of La Union”, meaning from the province above Pangasinan, called La Union, which is where my mother was born. Think of these provinces as the Lancashire and Yorkshire of the Philippines, John.

Note the date: 27 November 1941, two weeks before Pearl Harbor. Also note the flags: The Philippines was a US Commonwealth (which made us technically US nationals) and didn’t achieve independence until 4 July, 1946

There were about 100 Filipino-American clubs in the US around this time; this is the way Filipino immigrants socialized, and it was pretty successful. Even years later my mom could tell you the names and phone numbers of Filipinos in Calgary, Denver, Manila etc, just because they were Filipino and traded cards with her at some get-together for Filipinos-and-their-white spouses/children in Minneapolis. It was quite a network while it lasted.

But don’t get the idea that my father and my mother met through some stateside Filipino club, because at the time she was still in the Philippines, getting occupied and bombed on. (See “The Pure Joy of St Trinian’s and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness by Malcolm Arnold“.) We never talked about that part of her life at home, but after my father died I eventually managed to get some extremely unsettling details from my various cousins.

But aside from that, as it turned out, after the war mom and dad had met through the penpal ads that were in the back of the regular issues of the Asinganian Club newsletter, which circulated not only in the States but the Philippines. After my dad’s first marriage in the mid-1940s to a white, probably Irish, woman named Margaret—I’m going to imagine her name was Margaret—failed to work out (see “25 May—Two Birthdays: My Dad’s and My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson’s”) my dad, like so many other young guys working far from home in a strange new place, was counseled to take “a wife from the old country”. But where to find one? The immigration quotas of the 1920s-1940s were not favorable to single, marriageable Filipino men: the percentage during that time was never more than 2 marriageable females for every 98 marriageable males. But if you were a citizen (by then, my dad was already a total US citizen and the Philippines was a separate sovereign nation), you could travel to the islands, choose a wife, and bring her back as your dependent. A lot of American soldiers did this after the war.

What I didn’t learn until the second wave of cousins passed through our house in the period after my father’s death, was that my mom wasn’t the only by-mail bride he was courting.

EXTRA! As a San Francisco treat, here’s Dennis Hagerty between showings at the Castro Theatre playing our city theme, “San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate” from the 1936 MGM classic movie with Jeannette MacDonald and Clark Gable, San Francisco.

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To My Beloved John Wilson, Who Shares His May 25th Birthday with My Dad; Or, Don’t Call Me a Person Of Color, I’m a Product Of Empire, 3

I mentioned in “A Special Letter to My Beloved John Wilson, After His Appearance with the Sinfonia of London at The Glasshouse, Gateshead UK, 11 November 2023” a railroad tycoon who changed my father’s fortune after they met in St Louis (where my father moved to in order to marry his white fiancee and where he stayed after they broke up). Here’s his name: Winfield Stevens, Sr. He owned a short line (87 miles) called the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern Railway, which terminated in southern Minnesota in Northfield, a town notable for having waged a short bloody gun battle repelling the James-Younger gang, when those famous outlaws attempted to hold up the First National Bank back in 1876. This is annually celebrated in Northfield’s Defeat of Jesse James Days, complete with souvenir mugs and recreations on Main Street; there’s also on YouTube a swell western starring Robert Duvall as Jesse and dumb old Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger.

How Mr Stevens and my father initially met I’m not quite sure, although I think at this time my dad had gotten into domestic service, maybe even through his white wife (and possibly career housekeeper) Margaret… Because from the first Mr Stevens, liking the cut of his jib so to speak, employed my dad as an all-around house servant—major domo, valet, cook, chauffeur. In those days it was a prestige thing for a successful American (i.e. white) businessman to have an Oriental houseboy, like Sammee Tong in Bachelor Father. This is real F Scott Fitzgerald country.

Then when the old man died his son and heir, Winfield Stevens Jr, took over the railroad business and added to that his own Buick dealership. Mr Stevens Jr, being more of a family man, didn’t need a valet, so he got a job for dad with the MN&S in the yard so dad could join the railroad union and start racking up benefits. He also paid dad off the books to cook for his family on Sundays (which is when I would see my father dress for work in his crisp, clean white short-sleeved shirt and black bow tie); and during the hunting season he would cook for Mr Stevens and his railroad cronies wherever they were shooting. These two, three times a year dad would come home with a side of venison or a brace of pheasants which, I don’t know how he did it, he managed to cook pretty tastily. Probably it was the soy sauce, garlic and vinegar.

I went on one of these trips with my dad a couple times in ’63 when I was eight. It was fun, sleeping in the top bunk of a compartment all alone (dad slept with the men on the other side) in a railroad-car-turned-hunting-cabin, being so deep in the woods. And you can’t beat the Minnesota woodland, old and mysterious and full of Chippewa lore.

EXTRA! The Kingston Trio sing a rousing “The Ballad of Jesse James”.

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To My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson, Who Shares His May 25th Birthday with My Dad; Or, Don’t Call Me a Person Of Color, I’m a Product Of Empire, 4

So it’s 1951. There’s my dad in a clean prosperous city, Minneapolis, with a good job and good prospects, without a wife, not getting any younger, and going through a sort of anxious “last chance to have a family” phase.

His only hope for matrimony lay in the three—count ’em—three penpal relationships he started after he and Margaret the Irish-American housekeeper called it quits in St Louis and he followed his new boss, starting out in Mpls in a one-bedroom in a big old building near 38th & Chicago where the George Floyd memorial is now, and where my mother, then I four years later, were brought home to.

The Jai Alai Building in Manila—home of young marrieds, Filipino swells, and the WWII Japanese secret police.

Now, as I recall it, there were a couple of cousins on my dad’s side from Manila, spinster sisters, who came around to the house after dad died to: one, pay their respects; and two, make sure they were still getting their remittances. (Dad supported a lot of cousins in his lifetime.) Relieved at mother’s assurances that the checks would keep on coming, the two sisters—let’s call them Patti and Laverne—sat me down privately one evening during…I guess it was dad’s wake, more or less…to tell me the saga of the Three Penpals and My Father’s Quest for Ms Right.

My dad had her letters and her picture—like I said, she was as pretty as a movie star. And as Patti and Laverne reported back to my father, she was educated and from a good family in the professional class (her father, my lolo, my grandfather, José de la Peña a municipal judge; her mother, my lola, my grandmother, Cristina Abérin a schoolteacher). Domestic talents—nil, but look at that punim! They couldn’t have done a better job if they’d been selling Edward Rochester on Bertha Mason.

But more on that later. Let’s just say it worked like the plot of a Mamoulian musical, a fairy tale where all the women are either witches or princesses and there’s always that Magick Choice of Three…

So, according to Patti and Laverne’s scorecard, candidates one and two struck out but candidate three, my mother, was the bride for my dad. He wrote and proposed to her, she answered yes, except he’d have to meet her family first. Cut to scene of my dad landing in Manila where he hasn’t set foot in 24 years. Dad spends the rest of the dry season making the rounds of the de la Peñas, being inspected and generally approved of; my dad was always a simple, up-front guy and people got to like him very easily.

O, let us be married, too long we have tarried! But what shall we do for a church? was the question, as my father, a divorcé (remember Margaret?) didn’t qualify for a church wedding. Before too long someone in the family suggested the Jai Alai Building in Manila, the Art Deco showcase where the local smart set had their do’s and where the Japanese in World War Two had their secret police headquarters.

But the inside is nice and my parents’ wedding even made the society page. They described my dad as an “American businessman”.

EXTRA! For those of you who’ve read this to the end, here’s the danceable jukebox version of “Dahil Sa Iyo” I grew up listening to.

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My First Music: In Praise of My First Record Stash—6 Great American Songbook Songs “Co-written” by Billy Rose (1899-1966)

From December 2018: I got my first record collection when I was 3 1/2. We had just moved into a little bungalow in Northeast Minneapolis and the previous owners had left a stack of old, old 45s and 78s—Patti Page, Rosemary Clooney, Nelson Eddy, Rudy Vallee etc etc which my mother, heaven bless her, let me keep for myself to play on my kiddie phonograph. This, friends, was my first true introduction to The Great American Songbook. But wasn’t until I started working at ASCAP (at 18) where I had to learn the names of the melody and lyric writers the name “Billy Rose” came popping up (year is date of recording):

Rudy Vallee Would You Like to Take a WalkAbove: Would You Like to Take a Walk? by Harry Warren, Mort Dixon, and Billy Rose, sung by Rudy Vallee.

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Just for My Beloved Conductor John Wilson for His Upcoming 52nd Birthday: The Story at Last of How My Parents Met and Married

Looking ahead to May 25—John, I have three stories in my repertoire I’ve been saving all these years for that one special person. Not Mister Grumble, not Mamoulian, certainly not Steve Gyllenhaal. You. You read the first one, the story of how I met agent-turned-producer Michael Linnit and had my first orgasm at the St Regis. This is the second. (The third is the story of how I got my job as Night Solfeggist at ASCAP. I’ll tell that one this summer.)

My mother at 19 looked just like this when the Japs occupied Manila. You figure out that part of her story.

I’m writing it now when I have a few minutes here and there. Check back between when you finish up with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and before you start at Glyndebourne. I’ll start it on your birthday. I’m still in love with you and want to give you nice things. Mahal kita, mahal ko.

[see “To My Beloved John Wilson, Who Shares His May 25th Birthday with My Dad; Or, Don’t Call Me a Person Of Color, I’m a Product Of Empire, 1”]

[more of My Dad, Who Shares a Birthday with My Beloved John Wilson]

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“Glen Herbertovich Ray” Plus Jazz Waltz No.2 by Shostakovich

From 1 June 2018: I dunno, watching 6 years of The Americans put me in an operational frame of mind…so I’ve been looking back at puzzling scenes and scenarios throughout my own life, trying to put the pieces together into recognizable shape…

Above: The Concertgebouw perform Dmitri Shostakovich’s fetching and popular Jazz Suite No 2 VI, Waltz II called in our house “The Spies’ Waltz” because that’s what it sounds like

For example, that strange meeting in Loring Park under the statue of 19th century Norwegian violinist Ole Bull—was that really Mr Ray getting debriefed by a State Department/CIA guy? He always struck me as a little too European for our little Midwest hidey-hole (Minneapolis) anyway, not to mention his Russian was really, yummily good. Almost everything I know about Russia and the Russian language I first learned from Mr Ray and no one else, not even Mamoulian or Anthony Burgess.

I took Russian from Mr Ray for two years (1967-69), during which time: 1) I graduated from junior to senior high; 2) Mister Grumble was drafted, sent overseas and got shot at by the Ruskies; then halfway in 3) there were the assassinations of Martin and Bobby; and then to top it all off, 4) Richard Nixon finally gets elected president. Some ride, huh? I got in on some of the weirdness of that era, this is just one little piece.

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My First Music: Meredith Willson, and That Kennedy Thing, Part 1

This is still especially for John, my English darling, but also for anyone else who wants to read on and not give me flak for my conclusions. There is no more contentious, infighting body on the face of the earth than the Kennedy researchers, except for The Brontë Society.

Fortunately, I’m not a “Kennedy researcher”. But I remember the Friday lunchtime when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and initial memories turn out to be very important in reconstructing what really happened way back then. Even the memory of an eight year-old girl in 4th grade class 900 miles away counts.

So that Friday before Thanksgiving. Mrs Weisberg got a call and told us the President was dead and we went into the library to watch the TV coverage. Like a good police procedural, the suspect was apprehended almost right away, and after that all seemed to proceed as normally as a TV show: bad guy caught, law prevails, life back to normal, only normal+a little mourning (Oh, God! “Salute your father’s coffin, John-John”)+a new head of the country. Which was going to be the same country as always anyway, right?

What a different world that was then. What a bunch of saps those murdering thugs took us for.

But I want to talk about what I saw and heard in the first broadcasts, when the police and newspeople brought out Oswald and informed us that he was 24, an ex-Marine, from New Orleans, well-traveled, the father of two, with a foreign wife. (They got that info pretty fast, didn’t they. Within minutes. This before the internet. Talaga.) My kind of male? I was already interested in boys, I wanted to check him out.

He was strangely resolute in front of the camera. “Did you shoot the President and Officer Tippit?” demanded the newsman.

“No, I did not,” he replied firmly, and I was impressed by his looks, his composure, his educated, non-regionally-accented speech. The boys around me were gathering for a Hate Minute: Of course he did it! Otherwise he’d be jumping up and down hollering his innocence!

But at the age of eight-going-on-nine I had two weird revelations staring at that thin pale face.

  • One: He knows something.
  • Two: I’m probably going to marry a man like that.

So by golly, number two came true: A white southener, self-educated, self-composed, brilliant but secretive, an average-looking, average-sized man who could pass for thousands of other average men—

And—an operative of Army Intelligence. I’m looking at my blind bearded baby in front of me right now, grateful the Ruskies didn’t shoot him down on some wintry street in Prague in 1968.

In Part Two I’ll talk about ex-friend Hollywood director Stephen Gyllenhaal, his shockingly idiotic, insulting, slightly treasonous project, and Abraham Bolden, for whom I wrote the screenplay, at his personal request, Bolden: The Untold Story of JFK’s Assassination.

There is a Meredith Willson-John Kennedy connection! It’s this peppy number, which was commissioned by President Kennedy for his Council on Physical Fitness for kids like us to do their daily school calisthenics to. Some people remember this number with affection, many don’t. Robert Preston sang it and the Warner Bros orchestra played it. It’s called “Chicken Fat”. Ten times!

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A Special Letter to My Beloved John Wilson Conductor Part 2, with More Stories About My Dad (1905-1972), Who Shares His Birthday

John, it gives me such a kick telling you about my dad, I think I’ll write about him more.

Screening Room, SF 1979

Above: The Gillette Friday Night at the Fights TV Theme by Merrick+Anderson “Look Sharp Be Sharp” conducted by Eugene Ormandy. My dad’s favorite boxers: Sonny Liston (US), World Heavyweight Champion (and yeah, I greatly regard Mohammed Ali as a person but that 1965 bout in Maine was fixed—I mean, watch the film! Liston could’ve gotten up when he wanted but he purposely stayed down for the count and you can see it) —Pancho Villa (PH), World Flyweight Champion—Barney Ross (US), Lightweight, Light Welterweight, and Welterweight World Champion and loyal friend-to-the-end to Jack Ruby

He didn’t talk himself much, like a lot of other fathers I guess. He was born dirt-poor on the 25th of May, 1905 on the west coast of the big island, Luzon, on the South China Sea, in a province called Pangasinan, fabled kingdom of fabled Urduja, Warrior Queen, just like your King Arthur and yes she really lived and so did King Arthur, so there. Dad left school when he was 10, that would’ve been 1915, and went to work to support his grass widow (probably) mother. I get my Chinese heritage from dad’s distant family in Guangdong. (Catalonian and Irish from my mom.)

I don’t know how he got on for the next 12 years, but in 1927 he signed on to a cargo ship bound for San Francisco, where he ended up living for the next decade or so. SF, in some restaurant of some ex-boxer, is probably where he learned to cook, at least I’d like to think so. San Francisco is [putting finishing touches on my Kennedy piece—got some unsettling new information which I discovered on my own, absolutely NEW revelations and conjectures. You can’t believe how this is still a spooky topic in the States…I’ll finish my dad piece asap]

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A Special Letter Featuring Scott Fitzgerald to My Beloved John Wilson, After His Appearance with the Sinfonia of London at The Glasshouse, Gateshead UK, 11 November 2023

See the name up in the title of this posting, The Glasshouse? Got it right this time. The only reason I kept the out-of-date jpg up on your schedule, John, is because I love this picture of Gateshead so much and got too lazy to change to the new name. Expect that pic to crop up again in some other impersonation in the future.

Number two. This picture. Okay, I will admit to a sudden unexpected and totally unfamiliar onrush of an irrational emotion. But if you don’t understand how you get to me there’s no hope for you or your generation.

Number three. This picture. An honest artistic statement. Yeah I stole your selfie. Come and get me, coppers.

Number four. The matter at hand. I got the strong impression last night, John, that you were still in Gateshead (you’ve probably finished your Liverpool gig by now) and needed some sort of psychic “Daphne Moon” boost from me. Glad to oblige. I’ll tell you the story, long overdue, of how my dad and mom met and got married. It has to do with two of my aunties not-really-aunties-but-older-cousins—years of letter writing—and the Jai-Alai Building in Manila…

Shoot, time passes…now I’ve got to go be with Mister Grumble for a while. Tonight we’re listening to (my baby angel’s blind, remember?) the near-beginning of The United States of Socialism by Dinesh D’Souza; the middle of The Con Man by Ed McBain (“Mendo-zaaaaaaaah!”); and the last chapter of The Simulacra by Philip K Dick. Oh! And streaming the fifth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

I’ll return on my next writing day, which fortunately is tomorrow.

I see they’re making you travel from Gateshead down west to Liverpool and then back up north to Glasgow and then back down to Nottingham and finally over to Manchester. Jeez, what a schedule for you and your people.

So you want to hear more about my dad. Okay! I’ve owed you this for a while, sorry for the lateness, juggling a lot of balls, including a heart episode, not to winge. Continuing what I wrote in “25 May—Two Birthdays: My Dad’s and My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson’s“…

Well, after that whole thing about not being able to marry the woman he wanted to because of the miscegenation laws of the state of California, my dad and his white fiancee (never found out her name but it was the late 1940s so I bet it was something pretty like Helen or Margaret) went back to her home in Missouri where, like in most of the interior states, there were no legal barriers.

[4:30pm 13 Nov 2023 Pacific Time. Have to go now, Mister Grumble’s dictating his new novel to me, his sixth…be back as soon as I can…]

Mister Grumble is calling his latest novel The Last Bohemia. It’s about our old neighborhood, New York’s East Village, during the cheap-rent artsy 1980s. I’m really looking forward to it.

Back to my dad. So John, the marriage didn’t work out, of course, name me another interracial couple who made it work in the midwest in the 1940s-50s. So when they broke up in St Louis, my dad I guess was at a crossroads. There were two things he knew how to do, box (he was a small-time prizefighter in California in the 20s, a flyweight like his hero, Filipino 1923 champion-over-Welshman-Jimmy-Wilde, Pancho Villa)—and cook.

This is where that Minneapolis railroad tycoon comes in and where the story enters F Scott Fitzgerald country in more ways than one.

[2:20pm 14 Nov 2023 Pacific Time. If it doesn’t rain I promised to take Mister Grumble out for a beer, he can’t go out anymore by himself. (He has a red-tipped cane, but sighted people just don’t pay attention and the sidewalks are too littered anyway.) Still, the IPAs here are pretty good, so… ]

[WHOEVER’S READING THIS WHO ISN’T JOHN: If you’re around him during this tour and you can pass him a couple words when he won’t bite your head off, just let him know CANTARA GOT HIS DAPHNE and will try to write more soon. Right now I’ve got to talk about Kennedy]

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My First Music: “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen” Cantata 51 by Johann Sebastian Bach

I was 17 and my voice was not going to get me to the Met, but I enjoyed singing to the tiny group that gathered on Friday afternoons in Room 204 of Northrup Auditorium at the U in Minneapolis. The month my draftee boyfriend Jesse got out of the army (May 1972, just before he joined the Black Panthers) my teacher lent me an album of Teresa Stich-Randall and I picked out this number to do. It’s not a hard piece to learn but whoa, that breath control… That I managed to make it to the very end with some grace is due to Bach’s blessing to singers—all that forward motion impels you. But the effort was worth it. What a high!

Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach composed BWV 51 during a period when he composed church cantatas only irregularly, some of them to complete his earlier cycles. Both the soprano part, which covers two octaves and requires a high C, and the solo trumpet part, which at times trades melodic lines with the soprano on an equal basis, are extremely virtuosic. The cantata is one of only four sacred cantatas that Bach wrote for a solo soprano. The first aria, “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen” (“Exult in God in every land”), is in da capo form, with extended coloraturas. The theme, with a beginning in a triad fanfare, is well suited to the trumpet. It is first developed in a ritornello of the orchestra and then constantly worked in the soprano part. At least, that’s what I remember.

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My First Music: Soames Rapes Irene in The Forsyte Saga (BBC, 1967); “Halcyon Days” from Eric Coates’s Three Elizabeths Suite Played by the BBCPO and Conducted By My Excellent John Wilson

I was twelve when The Forsyte Saga was first shown on American TV and I thought it was the coolest series ever.* It was about a large, rich and, though unconnected, influential family living in late-capitalist England circa 1879, who keep getting into pretty heated conflicts with each other—which at the bottom are really about, more or less, the value of art and the inner life vs commerce—all the while being beautifully attired and beautifully well-spoken. Hearing this royal fanfare “Halcyon Days” that opened the show was enough to get me all excited with anticipation on a Sunday night, but it wasn’t until last year around May when I finally discovered the composer of the piece, Eric Coates, plus the rest of this ravishing movement, when I fell in love with conductor John Wilson and developed a raging need to get close to the music he’s close to.

Screening Room, SF 1979Above: Above Soames played by Eric Porter—The Man of Property, Noted Art Collector, and about as Mr Wrong as you can get—who mistook his wife for a soulless mannequin and, in novelist John Galsworthy’s sardonic words, “asserted his marital rights and acted like a man” in this scene, in which the BBC made shocking good use of Nyree Dawn Porter’s lovely embonpoint: My gorgeous, wondrous John Wilson leads the BBC Philharmonic in Coates’s “Halcyon Days”.

My beloved John conducted this 29 March, 2022 in Salford, as part of a program devoted exclusively to the music of prolific BBC composer, Eric Coates. It was glorious.

Here’s a remembrance of Nyree Dawn Porter and The Forsyte Saga in The Guardian reprinted in FB, including my protestation over the use of the word “frigid”.

*In fact it got me to read the entire cycle of nine novels the series was based on; finished them when I was thirteen. Dinny Cherrell’s my favorite character.

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“Leopold! Leopold!”

Here’s Stokowski, international maestro (and, like my beloved John Wilson, a graduate of the Royal College of Music) in my second favorite Deanna Durbin movie: 100 Men and a Girl. Directed by Henry Koster. Universal, 1937. Andre Previn‘s great-uncle Charles Previn, musical director, arranger, composer and conductor at Universal, won an Oscar for his score for 100 Men and a Girl. While at Universal, Previn accumulated over 225 films to his credit, including most of Deanna Durbin’s films.

The bass-baritone in the Bugs Bunny classic “Long-Haired Hare” (Warner Bros 1949), where the title of this posting comes from, is voiced by bass-baritone SF native (and, like my son, a former pupil at Mission High School) Nicolai Shutorev.

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My First Music: Friday Night Is Music Night with the BBC Concert Orchestra, Conducted by the Oh-So-Kissable John Wilson, August 2005

At around the same time of life the oh-so-kissable John Wilson was a wee bairn in Gateshead falling out of his high chair in excitement over the brand-new BBC news theme, I was in my playpen in the living room of the old one-bedroom apartment in South Minneapolis jumping up and down in excitement to the theme of Captain Kangaroo on TV.

Now here we are with my darling 33-year-old (in 2005) lad on the podium in the first televised broadcast of this longtime radio fixture, and I get to find out the titles of all those excerpts and show themes I’ve heard on the Beeb for years. The sign-in music, incidentally, is Charles Williams‘s “High Adventure.”

A Little Light MusicI will never understand the English tradition of drag. Now, the American tradition of drag, like future husband Mister Grumble doing his Twiggy impersonation at a gay revue in Dallas back in 1964—THAT’s hot. Above John and his admirer: Audio of the entire Friday Night Is Music Night program, “A Little Light Music”.

The program: “The Devil’s Galop” (Dick Barton Special Agent, Monty Python) / Charles Williams; “Portrait of a Flirt” / Robert Farnon; “The Lion and Albert” (comic verse) / Marriott Edgar; March from “Little Suite” (Dr Finlay’s Casebook) / Trevor Duncan; “Barwick Green” (The Archers) / Arthur Wood; “The Typewriter” (The News Quiz) / Leroy Anderson; “Roses of Picardy” / Haydn Wood; “Calling All Workers” (Music While You Work) / Eric Coates; “By the Sleepy Lagoon” (Desert Island Discs) / Eric Coates; “A Canadian in Mayfair” / Angela Morley; “In a Party Mood” / Jack Strachey; “Sailing By” (The Shipping Forecast) / Ronald Binge; “Charmaine” (Monty Python) / Erno Rapee; “Puffin’ Billy” (Captain Kangaroo!!!) at 47:00 / Edward White; “Birdsongs at Eventide” / Eric Coates; “The Dam Busters” March (from the 1954 film) / Eric Coates. Janis Kelly, soprano. Roy Hudd, host.

FULL DRESS // A gifted mesmerist—a sinister composer—a naive young conductor from the north…inspired by an episode from the life of Rachmaninoff // DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK POSTER

PATREON