I Can't Get Started with You

I'm going to a high school reunion tonight. While pondering the nature of success, this lyric came to mind and made me laugh. It's all relative, isn't it?

Lyrics by: Ira Gershwin
Music by: Vernon Duke
Originally made famous by: Bob Hope
From the Show: Ziegfeld Follies of 1936

There are a couple different versions on the web, so I just put them together.

I Can't Get Started With You
=============================
I'm a glum one
It's explainable
I met someone
Unattainable
Life's a bore
The world is my oyster no more

All the papers where I lead the news
With my capers Now will spread the news
Superman turns out to be flash-in-the-pan

I've flown around the world in a plane
I’ve settled revolutions in Spain
The North Pole I have charted
But I can’t get started with you

Around the golf course I’m under par
And all the movies want me to star
I’ve built a house and show place
But I can’t get no place with you

You’re so supreme
Lyrics that I write of you
Scheme, just for a sight of you
And I dream both day and night of you
And what good does it do

In 1929, I sold short
In London, I’m presented at court
But you’ve got me down hearted,
Cause I can’t get started with you

I've been around the world in a plane
Designed the latest IBM brain
But lately I'm so downhearted
'Cause I can't get started with you
In Cincinnati or in Rangoon
I simply smile and all the gals swoon
Their whims I've more than just charted
But I can't get started with you

O tell me why
Am I no kick to you
I who'd always stick to you
Fly through thin and thick to you
Tell me why I'm taboo

Each time I chanced
To see Franklin D.
He always said
Hi buddy to me
And with queens
I've a la carted
But I can't get started
With you

Jul 12, 1817

Yesterday was Henry David Thoreau's birthday, born July 12, 1817.

"Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink,
taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each."

Thank you, Jessica W, who posted the quote above and a Happy Birthday to Thoreau on First Universalist Church's Cybercoffeehour yesterday. Quoting Jessica, "Happy birthday Thoreau and thanks for your influence which is considerable indeed." Thoreau is one of our Unitarian Universalist ancestors, a UU saint. If we had saints. Which we don't. But if we did.

Here are some favorite, and most famous, quotations from his work:

I have a great deal of company in my house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.
*
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
*
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
*
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
*
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
*
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
*
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
*
How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?
*
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
*
I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes
*
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
*
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
*
In wilderness is the preservation of the world.
*
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
*
Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
*
The heart is forever inexperienced.
*
The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
*
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
*
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Happy Birthday, Henry.

big-hearted, tough, challenging, and fun.

I wouldn't mind at all if my kids thought of me this way: -- big-hearted, tough, challenging, and fun.

I think this is an aspiration that mothers of boys would have, more than mothers of girls. At lease I don't know if I would have had this aspiration if I had two girls. One of each? Who knows. That's when you have to admit that not all boys are alike and not all girls are alike.

Having boys has made me value a big heart, shrugging off the small stuff, hanging tough, rising to challenge. My pre-kid fantasies of girl children were more about emotional bonding and domestic sweetness.

Having boys has also kept me big-hearted toward men. I understand them more than I used to. So I believe, at any rate. Perhaps I just sweat the small stuff less in those relationships too.

=============================================================
"the teacher every kid should have -- big-hearted, tough, challenging, and fun."
Scott, describing his wife, in Old Bulb Gardens' "Friends of Old Bulbs Gazette"