Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy.
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high.
Oh, you daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’
So hush little baby
Don’t you cry
The last few days of hot weather made me think of this song and the opera PORGY AND BESS. It has an extended run now at the Court Theatre at the University of Chicago until July 3rd. I hope to get there soon. The Court Theatre is one of my favorite places in Chicago. They have five productions each year, four at the theatre on the Hyde Park campus and one at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Although they do not have the staging that Lyric Opera has, he Court Theatre productions are always above the minimalist’s approach of the Goodman.
For years I have stored things in my sister’s basement. I do not know how inanimate things reproduce, but they do. The last time I put anything down there was when I went to the Seminary. In the last ten years, all I have done is gotten rid of things. But now that there is more room to spread it out it seems to have grown. What materialized recently was a 3 LP set of Porgy and Bess, but no record player.
(For those who never had a record player or stereo, LP’s are long playing vinyl records that rotated at 33 1/3 times per minute vs. the old 78’s or 45’s. They held 25 minutes of music per side and you could stack many albums on turntable and then flip the stack and continue to enjoy the music.)
The family Christmas gift in 1953 was record changer; we moved from the single record player to the sophisticated changer. It also allowed you to change record speed so you could play 78’s and with an adapter for the big hole 45’s. I immediately joined the Columbia Record Club using my earnings from my paper route. Each month I received a record album, my preferred category then, was jazz. Summer came and the proper choice was the recent album of Porgy and Bess. This was three hours of music that I wanted to hear loud, too loud for the house, so I took the music to the backyard. It became too loud for my Catfish Row tenement. Mrs. Nichols, our story-teller neighbor and chief cookie baker extraordinary and generous (I never heard her say “Save one for sisters and brother”), asked me nicely, TO TURN IT DOWN. I heard her and still do whenever I listen to that music. It brings back many memories.
One of theses mornings
You’re goin’ to rise up signin’
Then you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take to the sky