Saturday evening was Redwood's annual outdoors concert, held in the courthouse square downtown. It's right near the train station, so I took the commuter train up. It runs every half an hour, well into the evenings, on weekends, and the parking garage down at my end won't be full.
Advertising for the concert advised bringing lawn chairs. I don't have one, and wouldn't be inclined to lug it on the train anyway. I figured I'd arrive early and sit on one of the low stone walls that surround the plaza. But what I found was that a large number of slat chairs had been arranged in front of the orchestra's tent, so I could sit in one of those.
The orchestra was under a tent, and was festooned with microphones, the speakers for which gave a tinny and metallic sound to the music, especially the strings. They played Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I'm always up for hearing, sloppy and warbly in places, but the Largo and finale came out pretty much OK.
Also on the program, the waltz from Swan Lake, and two extremely catchy military marches, the second of which conductor Eric Kujawsky is convinced was an homage to the first: the "Colonel Bogey" March, and the main theme from the movie The Great Escape, by Kenneth Alford and Elmer Bernstein respectively. I know both marches well, but this was the first time I'd ever heard either in concert.
When I was very small, 3 or 4 I guess, "Colonel Bogey," then in the flush of fame coming off its appearance in The Bridge on the River Kwai, was my favorite piece of music. I wrote lyrics to it about my baby brother, the first line of which is all I can remember and which went, "Mikey, he is a pike-pike boy." What a pike-pike boy may be, I can alas no longer remember.
When we went to a record store to buy a recording of "Colonel Bogey," my parents encouraged me to make the request. "Do you have 'Mikey Is a Pike-Pike Boy'?" I asked. The clerks disclaimed knowledge of this until my parents told me to sing it. Then they said, "Oh yes, we have that."
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