We'll have a blue room,
A new room,
For two room,
Where ev'ry day's a holiday
Because you're married to me.
Not like a ballroom,
A small room,
A hall room,
Where I can smoke my pipe away
With your wee head upon my knee.
We will thrive on,
Keep alive on,
Just nothing but kisses,
With Mister and Missus
On little blue chairs.
You sew your trousseau,
And Robinson Crusoe
Is not so far from worldly cares
As our blue room far away upstairs.
Unless my ears deceive me, that's Perry Como singing "Blue Room" (Rodgers and Hart), the song Betty says she liked so much in high school. Feeling romantic she gets Don to dance with her. Though there is some merit in Don's criticism of Como ("makes everything sound like Christmas"), the singer's rich baritone was never better than when he did such Rodgers and Hart songs as "Blue Room" and, in the late-1940s docupic with Mickey Rooney as Lorenz Hart, "Mountain Greenery."
The pertinence of the song in last night's episode is that it is, after "Tea for Two," perhaps the second greatest pop-lyric ode to married bliss: "where every day's a holiday because you're married to me." Perfect, for an hour in which everything connubial goes wrong: Don and Betty are interrupted by their kids in an all too rare amorous moment in bed; the couple argues and has a shoving match; the bed breaks; the stereo breaks; the little boy burns himself and has to be taken to the emergency room, the little girl accompanies dad to work and overhears. . . too much.
Poor Betty.
-- DL
