{"id":1513,"date":"2010-11-14T00:05:18","date_gmt":"2010-11-14T05:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1513"},"modified":"2015-09-25T19:57:09","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T23:57:09","slug":"i-get-a-kick-out-of-you-by-cole-porter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1513","title":{"rendered":"“Patricia”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“Patricia”
\n\"Anything<\/a><\/h2>\n

\u00a0I Get A Kick Out Of You by Cole Porter (1934), Sung by Eileen Rodgers 1962, Encountered 1962<\/h3>\n

In the last two weeks of August 1962, I traveled to New York to visit with my father.\u00a0 At this stage of his life he was teaching econom\"\"<\/a>ics in the Columbia Graduate School of World Business.\u00a0 He had just published his most important book, had either received or was about to receive his full professorship, and was three years into his successful second marriage.\u00a0 He and my stepmother had recently bought a country getaway home in Tannersville, up in the Catskills.\u00a0 In short, I was visiting a man at the top of his game.\u00a0 After years of struggle, it was all going his way.\u00a0 And he wanted to share it with me.<\/p>\n

I could sense the excitement.\u00a0 And it rubbed off onto three things that I remember happening.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One was that he took me on the Staten Island Ferry to pass the Statue of Liberty, and there\u2019s a picture of me doing that.\u00a0 It was a big gulp of the sheer glamor of the town, and I was duly impressed.<\/p>\n

Another was that a girl I\u2019ll call Patricia and her mother visited.\u00a0 And a third was that my dad took me to see the revival of Cole Porter\u2019s Anything Goes<\/em> off Broadway at the Orpheum Theatre and bought me the album.\u00a0 And the second and third of these events converged somehow in my mind.<\/p>\n

I was now a rising eighth grader.\u00a0 Back in my fifth grade, Sister Rose Irene, one of those charismatic teachers who makes indelible contributions to your growth, had decided that four of her charges were getting too little out of the grade school library, and had sent us up to the high school library instead.\u00a0 That began one of the great friendships of my youth.<\/p>\n

The four of us, two boys and two girls would not just climb the stairs to mingle with our elders, we began to hang out together at each other\u2019s houses.\u00a0 One of them was Patricia, a slim, tall, thoughtful girl.\u00a0 We talked on the phone a lot, and with her I could talk about almost anything.\u00a0 I visited her home sometimes even if there were only two of us, and not the foursome.\u00a0 And by the beginning of eighth grade I was beginning to have feelings for her.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s a photo of us here.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Four. “Patricia” is behind me to my right.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve described in my previous Theme Songs entry where I was in my thinking about girls.\u00a0 Perhaps I\u2019d moved on just a little from that stage to the moment I am speaking of, now that I was turning Patricia over in my mind.\u00a0 Together, we\u2019d been picked out as special.\u00a0 Having her as a friend, someone with valuable things on her mind to share, and to appreciate the most important things about me \u2013 that was of far more moment than the thought that, for instance, we might be smooching some time.<\/p>\n

And what was one of the most important things about me then?\u00a0 Why, the fact that, though I lived in Ann Arbor, I had something of a second life, with a dad and stepmom in Manhattan.\u00a0 So when it befell that Patricia and her mom would be visiting in New York at the same time as I, it was like manna from heaven.\u00a0 I could bring Patricia into my New York life!\u00a0 She could see (and hopefully admire) that side of me.\u00a0 I agitated with Patricia\u2019s mom and my dad for a meeting in Manhattan.\u00a0 And the parents complied.<\/p>\n

My dad lived on the Upper West Side in a University-owned apartment, so Patricia and her mom came up there.\u00a0 We were a couple of blocks away from the Riverside Cathedral, the nondenominational Gothic structure that towers over Morningside Heights.\u00a0 So we all went sightseeing there.\u00a0 You\u2019d think, considering how important it was, I\u2019d remember more details of that visit.\u00a0 But that\u2019s memory for you.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember much about it.\u00a0 I remember climbing the steeple with Patricia and her mom.\u00a0 I remember being very excited about the whole thing.\u00a0 And that\u2019s about it, at least as far as events go.<\/p>\n

But as far as feelings go, there\u2019s definitely more.\u00a0 The excitement didn\u2019t go away.\u00a0 Patricia may only have been a girlfriend in my mind, but now she was in on my second life.\u00a0 We could talk about it, which was huge.\u00a0 It made me long to get back to our phone calls, when I got back home.[1]<\/p>\n

In the meantime, though, I was also an avid theatergoer, a taste my dad shared.\u00a0 And so down to the Village we went, to the Orpheum,[2] to see a revival of Cole Porter\u2019s Anything Goes<\/em>.\u00a0 Although you could hardly grow up in that era with parents marinated in their own generation of pop culture and not be exposed to Cole Porter, you could (and I did) do it without listening to the songs very hard, and certainly without registering his name.\u00a0 Porter wrote first and foremost for the stage, and when you heard his songs in context, a lot of things swam into focus and you would not forget the name any more.\u00a0 Percy Hammond of the Herald Trib<\/em>[3] commented on the original 1935 show that Porter\u2019s songs were \u201cribald and sentimental.\u201d\u00a0 That nails it.\u00a0 Much of the best of Porter is ribald and sentimental all at once.\u00a0 That\u2019s a combination that chimes with the deepest vibrations in a young adolescent\u2019s developing soul, whether or not he recognizes the receptors for them in his mind.<\/p>\n

Although there\u2019s nothing x-rated about the lyrics,[4] and high schools can and do put on productions of the show without offense, when you see the whole package (chorines dressed as angels but fluttering their diaphanous dresses like strippers, a revivalist anthem, Blow, Gabriel, Blow<\/em>, that says farewell to carnality and worldliness with utter Broadway razzamatazz, and a gangster\u2019s girlfriend showing off her underwear doing high kicks) you know you\u2019re in the presence of ribaldry.<\/p>\n

But by the same token when you hear expressions of longing like I Get A Kick Out of You<\/em> and All Through the Night<\/em>, you cannot be blind to the fact that the lyricist knew a thing or two about the emotional side of love as well.\u00a0 He knew about being in love when the object of your affections doesn\u2019t reciprocate \u2013 which is in fact the situation limned by I Get A Kick Out of You<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Indeed, that was the one obvious thing I shared with Cole Porter, after eliminating, for instance, being grownup, or gay but stuck in a straight marriage, the way he was.\u00a0 And the contrast was more marked with Reno Sweeney, the character singing the song (Ethel Merman in the original, Eileen Rodgers in the revival).\u00a0 Unlike Reno, I was a) male, b) young, c) unfamiliar with drugs and alcohol, d) not accustomed to flying airplanes, and e) never known to go \u201cout on a quiet spree,\u201d whatever that exactly means.\u00a0 (In Porter\u2019s case it probably meant trolling the louche bars of the Left Bank for the relief of easy male companionship.)\u00a0 So there was a lot I couldn\u2019t identify with in the song.<\/p>\n

But the heart of it was all me.\u00a0 Like Reno and Cole, I understood that the secret obsession one might entertain for the object of one\u2019s affections would make every other amusement pale a little.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that I would have described going to movies, playing board games, or hanging with my friends (my competing satisfactions) as \u201cmy idea of nothing to do,\u201d as Reno phrases it, but there was no question that the pinnacle of my emotions right then was reached when I was talking on the phone with Patricia.\u00a0 This song spoke powerfully to that[5] \u2013 and the distinctions between me and the writer, and\/or me and the singer, were just static, just statistical error.<\/p>\n

And so I listened a lot to that album.\u00a0 It was more than getting a fix of ribaldry and sentiment.\u00a0 It contributed to my musical ear too.\u00a0 The musicals whose records I\u2019d grown up with to this point had all had full orchestras.\u00a0 Anything Goes<\/em> featured a charming but distinctly pared-back ensemble, in which you can hear every instrument clearly, and every instrument counts (it has to).\u00a0 I was in love with the sound of that pit band.\u00a0 I must have listened to the overture a dozen times just to hear its sonorities.\u00a0 And when it came to I Get a Kick<\/em>, somehow the trumpet\u2019s melancholy in that song made it for me more than Rodgers\u2019 voice.<\/p>\n

That was the beginning and end of my Cole Porter experiences until the Rock Era, when Porter would come back in a different setting altogether.\u00a0 But that\u2019s a later story.<\/p>\n

The tale of Patricia took a while to wind down too, but I can summarize.\u00a0 Matters reached their crisis the following year, the Saturday after Kennedy\u2019s assassination.\u00a0 I was walking along with her and, in my mourning and my longing, tried to put my arm around her.\u00a0 The reaction I got made it clear that this was not at all a direction she\u2019d ever thought we might go.\u00a0 She more or less fled.\u00a0 And that ended up being more or less that.<\/p>\n

I get a kick,<\/address>\n
Though it\u2019s plain to see<\/address>\n
You obviously don\u2019t adore me.<\/address>\n

Amen.<\/p>\n

\n

[1].\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to convey now \u2013 when everyone has a cell and can talk across the country for the same price as across the street, and can e-mail, instant message, post on Facebook, or tweet \u2013 how the limited number of party-line landline phones in one\u2019s home, phones that one\u2019s parents could eavesdrop upon, and the barrier posed by Long Distance rates loomed over the early adolescent effort to have confidential talks.<\/p>\n

[2].\u00a0 For a little background on the Orpheum theater, see here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3].\u00a0 Quoted in Curtis F. Brown\u2019s excellent liner notes of the recording of the 1962 revival discussed here.<\/p>\n

[4].\u00a0 Well, almost.\u00a0 The reference to cocaine (\u201cI know that if \/ I took even one sniff \/ It would bore me terrif-\/ ically too\u201d) had to be changed for the movies<\/a> and probably doesn\u2019t get used in high school productions.\u00a0 But in those more innocent (or is it sophisticated?) times, cocaine was viewed more neutrally by popular culture, as an intoxicant of a legitimacy on a par at least with that of alcohol.\u00a0 In 1934, when these words were first sung, cocaine was regulated in the United States as a narcotic (incorrectly, since it is actually a stimulant), which meant that it could be possessed and used with a license.\u00a0 And apparently there was little or no enforcement activity directed at it until it was classified as a Controlled Substance in 1970.<\/a> \u00a0Meanwhile, and by way of significant comparison, Prohibition has just been repealed two years earlier<\/a>.\u00a0 The unjustified banning of alcohol doubtless diminished the respect Porter and his contemporaries would have felt for attempts to stigmatize and illegalize cocaine.\u00a0 Whether their views about either alcohol or cocaine were right or wrong is beyond the scope of this essay.<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0\u00a0 After Frank Sinatra, most singers have jazzed up the song.\u00a0 This is a perfectly legitimate use of the material, but not the best.\u00a0 It was designed to be sung slowly and longingly.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be deceived by cheap imitations.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But by the same token when you hear expressions of longing like I Get A Kick Out of You and All Through the Night, you cannot be blind to the fact that the lyricist knew a thing or two about the emotional side of love as well. He knew about being in love when the object of your affections doesn\u2019t reciprocate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[968],"tags":[1722,1715,1712,1730,1732,1707,1710,1709,1734,1731,1729,1708,1603,1561,1726,1736,1721,1706,108,1724,1725,1718,1719,1720,1735,1733,1723,1717,1716,1713,1714,1711,1728,1727],"class_list":["post-1513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theme-songs","tag-all-through-the-night","tag-anything-goes","tag-catskills","tag-cell-phones","tag-cocaine","tag-cole-porter","tag-columbia-graduate-school-of-world-business","tag-columbia-university","tag-controlled-substantces","tag-curtis-f-brown","tag-e-mail","tag-eileen-rodgers","tag-emile-benoit","tag-ethel-merman","tag-facebook","tag-frank-sinatra","tag-herald-tribune","tag-i-get-a-kick-out-of-you","tag-john-f-kennedy","tag-kennedy-assassination","tag-long-distance","tag-morningside-heights","tag-orpheum-theatre","tag-percy-hammond","tag-prohibition","tag-regulation-of-cocaine","tag-reno-sweeney","tag-riverside-cathedral","tag-sister-rose-irene","tag-staten-island-ferry","tag-statue-of-liberty","tag-tannersville","tag-tweets","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1513"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5464,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions\/5464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}