On Sinatra’s Birthday
Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.
But why try to change me now?
An Englishman is happy when he's fighting for his queen
and the dawn comes up like thunder.
What a guy. What a fool am I.
It’s a quarter to three. Fools rush in.
Why do I do just as you say?
You broke my heart, you took it apart.
That’s life. I'm just a mess without you.
A lady doesn’t blow on some other guy’s dice,
those fingers in my hair, a whole gang of love,
and I laughed to think it might turn out that way.
When I bit off more than I could chew,
why should I cry over you?
My kind of people, too.
What a world, what a life, I’m in love.
-- David Lehman 12/12/12
Cyrille Aimee of the curls
proves vocally that “Three Little Words”
as done with pianistic elegance by Dick Katz in 1992
remains a great jazz standard
in the “I love you” category
illustrated by Sinatra in “I Love You” (Harlan Thompson music,
Harry Archer words) in 1953, which I recommend you listen to
after watching Stalag 17 in which the song orchestrates
the POW party in the barracks where the Animal, drunk
and deluded, thinks he is dancing with Betty Grable.
Twenty years have gone by since the Voice was silenced by the grim reaper. But you can still hear him -- the smooth beauty of the 1940s, the roughened swinger of the Capitol Years, the Chairman of the Board who sang "That's Life" and "Fly Me to the Moon" -- they're all available on vinyl, tape, CD, and satellite radio.
But if you're in NYC you have one more excellent option -- you can catch Steve Maglio in tuxedo with three accompanists taking requests and singing "The Best is Yet to Come," "Summer Wind," "It was a Very Good Year," "All of Me," and "High Hopes" at the Beach Cafe on Sunday nights.
Read all about it in today's Daily News. -- DL
Paul Fericano is a working class poet, satirist and social activist. He is the author of The Hollywood Catechism (Silver Birch Press) and several more poetry and prose books and chapbooks, including Interview with the Scalia, Commercial Break, Driving to Reno with Freud, and Loading the Revolver With Real Bullets. He is the editor and co-founder of Yossarian Universal (1980), the nation’s first parody news service, and he is a founder of SafeNet, an advocacy group that assists survivors of clergy sexual abuse by fixing on healing and restorative justice; he also writes an online column about this work, A Room with a Pew.
Since 1971, his poetry and prose have appeared, disappeared and reappeared in various underground and above-ground literary and media outlets in this country and abroad, including: The Antarctic Review, Inside Joke, Mother Jones, Poetry Now, Projector, The Realist, Saturday Night Live, SoHo Arts Weekly, Vagabond, The Wormwood Review, and Catavencu Incomod (Romania), Charlie Hebdo (Paris), Il Male (Italy), Krokodil (Moscow), Pardon (Germany), Punch (London) and Satyrcón (Argentina). Paul Fericano received the Howitzer Prize for his poem, “Sinatra, Sinatra,” an award he himself created and exposed as a literary hoax to reveal the absurd nature of competitive awards. The following year, Commercial Break received both the Prix de Voltaire (Paris) and the Ambrose Bierce Prize (San Francisco) for upholding the traditions of socio-political satire. He resides on the San Francisco peninsula.
Because I am valuing order at the moment, I thought I'd start at the beginning -- literally. The front matter of your book includes praise from a variety of newspapers & publications both here and across the pond. I noticed that several described you by summoning the language of subterfuge, such as how you write "like a wanted man hiding out in the basement of Poetry magazine" (Chicago Sun-Times) or that "if a witness protection program" existed for poets, you'd be in it (Washington Post Book World). How does your work, and this book in particular, connect to the covert?
Yeah. If you talk to some of my friends they’ll swear they never heard of me. The Hollywood Catechism represents the progressive arc my narrative has taken since my high school seminary days at a Franciscan boarding school in the sixties. My desire to write conspired with my need to be funny which collided with my vocation to serve God. As a naïve fourteen year old freshman I was taught that God and poetry were essentially great because both were solemn and unfathomable. In English class we were instructed to examine not feel. Poems were prayers and prayers were sacred with no hint that ancient writers even knew what a joke was.
What little I knew of poetry and God was encyclopedic compared to what I knew about sex and my own body. During this time the priest who ran my screwy English class was sexually assaulting me under the guise of medical treatment. I was a fearful, angry and depressed kid, ashamed and confused about something I couldn’t name. The irony of my dismal situation was almost comical. I was studying to be a priest in the house of God, being molested by a priest who was teaching me English, and looking for salvation in poetry.
One day in religion class, after reading the story of “Mr. Blue,” a modern day parable about a crazy character who doesn’t fit in, I began to write my thoughts in a daily journal. The tide turned for me near the end of my freshman year when I discovered a battered copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy wedged behind a toilet tank in the seminary’s main bathrooms. Some of the pages were torn out which led me to believe the book was not just there for reading. I’d been ignorant my entire short life until I opened that book. For the first time since my arrival I felt someone was speaking directly to me. Six months later I left the seminary for good.
What happened after you left?
By 1977, I was reading and learning from living poets like Edward Field, Wanda Coleman, A.D. Winans, Ron Koertge, Al Young, Laurel Speer, Steve Kowit, Ishmael Reed, Sharon Olds and Gerald Locklin while promoting a second collection of my own poetry, Loading the Revolver with Real Bullets, published by Second Coming Press of San Francisco, my hometown. The year before I had instigated “stoogism,” a mock-literary movement that Allen Ginsberg dubbed “the only movement with a punch line.” The label “standup poet” was being attached to my name and I was playing the role of court jester in a crowded throne room. It was an exciting time to be involved in the small press literary scene.
Stoogism
i dreamt of Moe
last night
he was crying
he took
the laughter
out of his head
and thanked me
and when I saw
myself
about to cry
he whispered:
wake up
and go to sleep
and i did
And then you morphed from satirist to provocateur!
The following year my poetry and politics got me in trouble with the California State Senate. A short, eighteen-line poem from my second collection was photocopied, distributed, and read on the floor of the senate by Bob Wilson, a senator from Costa Mesa. Wilson used it as a reason why the California Arts Council (CAC) should be abolished. The poem in question, “The Three Stooges at a Hollywood Party,” was a spoof of American conservatism.
Wilson claimed it slandered actors John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Stuart Whitman and Glen Campbell, who were all mentioned in the poem. Since the book had been published with grant money from the CAC, the senator argued that California would likely be sued for libel. Within hours of his stunt several major news outlets picked up the story, including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian of London, and even the Soviet news agency Tass, which allegedly tried to use the films of the Three Stooges as propaganda for capitalist violence. Dozens of newspapers published the poem. By the end of the year, the book had nearly sold out.
What kind of stage are you setting, so to speak, with a photograph of Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry on the cover of this book?
There’s a lot going on there. There’s the hucksterism of religion and the mumbo jumbo beliefs portrayed in the movie by an actor who, in real life, was a free thinker and champion of liberal causes. There are issues of veneration, hypocrisy and self-delusion presented in the context of a Hollywood culture that survived the McCarthy witch hunts and most of Mickey Rooney’s films. There’s the foible of star idolatry wedded to divine providence. Reciting prayers, memorizing lines and writing poetry are subversive acts. Religious devotion and celebrity worship demand allegiance, but poetry does best when it steers clear of any nonsense that defines it as something better than something else. The book’s cover also represents some personal mischief. Burt Lancaster bears an uncanny resemblance to my father.
Reading this book felt like eating a wild stew of American socioculture and celebrity: Poe and Freud appear alongside Curly and Moe from The Three Stooges; Lon Chaney, Jr. "howls" in the manner of Allen Ginsberg; God throws the hammer down on the "First Lady of Radio" Kate Smith; Porky Pig translates Basho; and Sinatra is defined as an multi-tiered entry in a dictionary. What is important about this kind of collaging? What does it add to the even greater gumbo of American letters?
It extends the reach of my own poetry by relating to time and place and reminding me to take the writing seriously but not the self. (The only thing good about self-importance is that Trump has given it a bad name.) I have no idea what my work adds to that steaming pot of literary mush. The danger of being as relevant as yesterday’s news comes with the territory and I willingly accept it.
[But] missing the mark means you took the shot. I like breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly into the camera. The late poet Ann Menebroker aptly described this rebellion as “Chico Marxist.” Lampoons, parodies and spoofs in literature are hazardous grinds that exact a price and take a toll. Poems like “Sinatra, Sinatra,” “The Director’s Prayer,” and “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” dare readers to take their hands off the wheel and close their eyes.
Sinatra, Sinatra
Sexual reference:
A protruding sinatra
is often laughed at by serious women.
Medical procedure:
A malignant sinatra
must be cut out by a skilled surgeon.
Violent persuasion:
A sawed-off sinatra
is a dangerous weapon at close range.
Congressional question:
Do you deny the charge of ever being
involved in organized sinatra?
Prepared statement:
Kiss my sinatra.
Blow it out your sinatra.
Financial question:
Will supply-side sinatra halt inflation?
Empty expression:
The sinatra stops here.
The sinatra is quicker than the eye.
Strategic question:
Do you think it's possible to win
a limited nuclear sinatra?
Stupid assertion:
Eat sinatra.
Hail Mary full of sinatra.
Serious reflection:
sinatra this, sinatra that.
sinatra do, sinatra don't.
sinatra come, sinatra go
There's no sinatra like show sinatra.
Historical question:
Is the poet who wrote this poem still alive?
Biblical fact:
Man does not live by sinatra alone.
In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man," you've taken one of the most notable poems of our times and married it to the blight of racism. Your model is a poem written by Wallace Stevens, one of the great American modernists who was also a racist and whose indelible work many writers (including myself) feel conflicted about. To make matters more complex, you are a white man writing about an experience you have only observed vs. endured. Could you share a little bit about your choices behind this poem and how you work through nuance, contradiction, and the hesitancy that can accompany them?
You’re the first to nail that. A lot of my poems have secret passageways and trapdoors that chart unlikely escape routes. I had been re-reading a book of poetry by my friend, klipschutz (Kurt Lipschutz), which included his very funny “Thirteen Ways of Eating a Burrito.” At the same time, the news had exploded about Trayvon Martin, the young, unarmed black man in Florida shot and killed by a man who felt threatened by Martin’s looks and behavior. The first line that came to me was “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.” I thought: “Okay, a little channeling of Wallace Stevens would be a healthy thing right about now.” The poem became an absurd retelling of Stevens’ original use of language and ideas with an attempt to reconcile the “eye of the beholder” with the specter of race and racism.
I’d also like to add that while I am, indeed, considered white, I didn’t always feel that way growing up. My family’s thick, black hair, dark, olive skin and imperfect English, as well as those of other Italians in our neighborhood, stood in stark contrast to our neighbors of German and Nordic descent. Race and prejudice in the fifties were as common as rabbit ears on a TV set. It wasn’t unusual to hear words like “black dago,” “dirty wop,” and “guinea” used as nasty invective or with reckless familiarity. The epithets had an isolating effect, particularly if you were very young and heard such distinctions being made between white kids and everyone else.
What we experienced was nothing compared to what some African American neighbors went through. It wasn’t just white against everyone else. Italians, my uncles included, would sometimes call each other “dago” as if they were talking about fish. But they were just as guilty of using the “N” word as the guy around the corner who flew a Confederate flag every Fourth of July. Some kids would repeat what their parents said, but others crossed the line looking for trouble. I was with my older brother and some cousins in the park when we saw a big white kid pounding on a small black kid. The black kid was someone we’d seen before, my age, about eight years old. My brother, who was 12, ran over and told the white kid to pick on someone his own size. He took a swing at my brother and my brother decked him with one punch. I never forgot it.
At first the tone of this collection feels predominantly playful in terms of subject matter and language, but by the time I finished reading it, I could see that it was also wistful and melancholy all along, addressing not only the silliness of celebrity but also its solitude and, by turn, your own. Why do you find humor as a valuable construct in your work? What tradition do you feel you are a part of in terms of this aesthetic?
It’s valuable in my poetry because it helps liberate and, in some ways, define the struggle I believe we all have with the absurdity of needless suffering. It’s not enough to stand for something and be angry with how the country is run or where the world is headed. To effect change you put that something, whatever it is, in play.
I think the tradition I’m part of demands I navigate this new golden age of satire with a pocket full of pyrite and no compass. The offensive nature of any satirical work (mine included) is implicit and inescapable. This is not a time for the timid or thin-skinned. I believe I’m just as sincere as anyone else in trying to determine why I’m somewhere rather than how I get anywhere.
There are a lot of borrowed forms in your book -- from Catholic prayer, to found dialogue, to structures imagined first by Ginsberg & Stevens. What do you like about working within an already set framework?
I absolutely love parody. It’s a difficult and challenging form that requires even more discipline and concentration than usual. It’s immensely satisfying when you stay true to the original and hear your own voice. The Catholic prayers came quickly and easily, particularly “The Actor’s Creed” and “The Halle Berry.” In the poem for Robin Williams I used his own words to address the loss I felt on the passing of my friend. Writing “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” was both torture and bliss. I went into a zombie trance for months and loved it. A parody of Ginsberg’s most famous work is doomed to failure from the start if 1) you don’t have a convincing subject of your own to carry the poem; and 2) you’re unprepared to carry it through all the way. I felt fortunate. A twisted Hollywood culture had produced Lon Chaney, Jr. His life, in front of and away from the camera, was eerily compelling. The transformation of the poem itself became an apt metaphor for his heart-wrenching makeover as “The Wolfman.”
Who specifically has influenced your poems and how you approach them?
A lot of my poetry is inspired by an endless list of brilliant and peculiar characters from the classics to cartoons. One of the few positive things I took away from my seminary training was discernment, self-discipline and good study habits. I valued a diverse education and appreciated singular voices no matter how contrary or complex, no matter how silly or strange. Kurt Vonnegut, Buster Keaton, Bob Kaufman, Jelly Roll Morton, A.D. Winans, Dr. Seuss, Adrienne Rich, Scrooge McDuck, Pablo Neruda, the Ritz Brothers and hundreds more, all had a hand in twisting my work like a pretzel.
My personal holy trinity consists of Edward Field, Joseph Heller and Paul Krassner. Their sharp, contrasting styles have taught me to trust my instincts and bring a pie to a knife fight. In the workforce I paid attention to Ferlinghetti, Diane DiPrima and Lenny Bruce.
We labor in a field of tall egos. It does us good now and then to acknowledge our contemporaries and offer praise without favor. In the seventies I attended a reading by Richard Eberhart at the University of California at Davis. At a reception afterwards, Eberhart encouraged us to not only read the works of living poets but to “drop them a line.” He believed in sincere and unsolicited communication at a time when people walked to the curb to check their mail. Poets, he said, should inform other poets. It’s one way we learn who’s out there in the field with us.
What are you working on now?
I’m involved in a number of writing projects. One is a verse novel based on stories my father told me about growing up with wise guys in North Boston. Another is a verse memoir about the first 100 days of my abuse at the seminary. I’m also crafting, under my parody news syndicate, Yossarian Universal, a series of reports and dispatches emanating from an unknown source. The dark, Klingon days of Der Gropenführer are upon us and it’s going to take more than a few torches to illuminate the skulkers who prowl the shadows.
The upside-down optimism that Trump promotes is a threat not only to reality but to legitimate madness. Speak truth to power, yes, but also speak crazy to crazy with a straight face. Reclaim the narrative. When clergy abuse survivors, fearful of being re-traumatized, ask me how I’m still able to walk into a church today, I tell them I simply make the sign of the cross with one hand and hold my crotch with the other.
I like to remind myself that the vast literary landscape I wander through often bears more of a resemblance to the “Cheese Shop” sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus than it does to the grand ballroom scene in The Great Gatsby. Karl Shapiro, who had a wicked sense of humor, once told me that if you laid out all the poems in the world end-to-end, people would use them to walk on.
Paul Fericano will read his work at Bird and Beckett Books and Records on Sunday, November 12, at 2 pm, as part of Three On a Match, The New and Improved Reading Series.
Bob Fosse said Guys and Dolls (1950) was "the greatest Broadway musical of all time." Frank Loesser (on left) wrote the words and the music. A rare double-threat, he did the same for the Pulitzer-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), which gave certain young men a somewhat misleading idea of what work on Madison Avenue entailed. From that magnificent show, here is Robert Morse, who more recently was the wise old eccentric Bert Cooper on Mad Men, singing -- to his mirrored self -- I Believe in You
And here is the first chorus of the title song of Guys and Dolls:
When you see a guy reach for stars in the sky,
You can bet that he's doing it for some doll.
When you spot a John waiting out in the rain,
Chances are he's insane, as only a John can be for a Jane.
When you meet a gent paying all kinds of rent
For a flat that could flatten the Taj Mahal,
Call it sad, call it funny, but it's better than even money,
That's the guy's only doing it for some doll.
We love you, Frank! Sincerely, Nathan Detroit.
What a great and unlikely conjunction of names and sensibilities: Bob Dylan opens up about his recent turn to the standards that Sinatra, Ella, Nat Cole, Crosby, Torme, Judy Garland and Jo Stafford sang. Dylan's understanding of the music is impressive, and if only he had a better voice the records would be wonderful. As it is I would sooner listen to Dylan sing an Irving Berlin song than, say, Rod Stewart, who turns everything into elevator music. Dylan can feel the lyrics and knows his job is to serve them as best he can. The voice carries conviction if not always the tune. It is easy to imagine young Bob listening to Sinatra. Bob loved Harold Arlen and no one sang Arlen songs better than Sinatra: 'Blues in the Night,' 'Last Night when We Were Young,' 'That Old Black Magic," 'I've Got the World on a String.' I can't imagine Sinatra listening to Dylan records, but the scene of the blue-eyed boys as described by Dylan below has the smack of truth.-- DL
They do mean a lot more. These songs are some of the most heartbreaking stuff ever put on record and I wanted to do them justice. Now that I have lived them and lived through them I understand them better. They take you out of that mainstream grind where you’re trapped between differences which might seem different but are essentially the same. Modern music and songs are so institutionalized that you don’t realize it. These songs are cold and clear-sighted, there is a direct realism in them, faith in ordinary life just like in early rock and roll.
It’s hard not to think of World War II when we hear some of these. You were born during the war – do you remember anything about it?
Not much. I was born in Duluth – industrial town, ship yards, ore docks, grain elevators, mainline train yards, switching yards. It’s on the banks of Lake Superior, built on granite rock. Lot of fog horns, sailors, loggers, storms, blizzards. My mom says there were food shortages, food rationing, hardly any gas, electricity cutting off – everything metal in your house you gave to the war effort. It was a dark place, even in the light of day – curfews, gloomy, lonely, all that sort of stuff – we lived there till I was about five, till the end of the war.
***
People called Shadows in the Night a tribute to Frank Sinatra. Did you know Sinatra had recorded all those songs when you put that record out?
Yeah, I knew he did, but a lot of other people recorded them as well, it just so happened that he had the best versions of them. When I recorded these songs I had to make believe that I never heard of Sinatra, that he didn’t exist. He’s a guide. He’ll point the way and lead you to the entrance but from there you’re on your own.
There is a famous story that you and Springsteen were invited to a dinner party at Sinatra’s house around the time you did that TV tribute to him. Had you met him before? Did you feel like he knew your stuff?
Not really. I think he knew “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Blowin’ In the Wind.” I know he liked “Forever Young,” he told me that. He was funny, we were standing out on his patio at night and he said to me, “You and me, pal, we got blue eyes, we’re from up there,” and he pointed to the stars. “These other bums are from down here.” I remember thinking that he might be right.
Everybody on that show did a Sinatra song except you. You sang “Restless Farewell.” How come?
Frank himself requested that I do it. One of the producers had played it for him and showed him the lyrics.
Was that the last time you saw Sinatra?
Maybe once after that.
What was the first time you saw him?
Pittsburgh, maybe ‘67 or ‘68 at the Civic Arena. He sang “Summer Wind,” “Day In, Day Out,” “Moonlight in Vermont.”
Sinatra did a lot of songs about growing old, but “The Best Is Yet to Come” is about defying age. It was the last song he ever sang on stage. How did you get inside that song? What do you think you bring to it that makes it worth your cutting?
It wasn’t difficult. I didn’t bring anything unusual to it. There are a lot of key shifts and modulations in that song and you have to slide your way in and out of them. It’s a bit of a challenge, but once you figure it out, it’s pretty easy. It’s just a straight-ahead blues-based ballad, unique in its own way. It’s like “Mack the Knife,” but nothing like “Mack the Knife.” It’s such an old-fashioned phrase, you wouldn’t think anybody could do anything with it. “The best is yet to come” could be both a threat and a promise; the lyrics sort of insinuate that even though the world is falling down, a better one is already in its place. The song kind of levitates itself, you don’t have to do much to get it off the ground. I like all of Carolyn Leigh’s lyrics too; she wrote the lyrics to “Stay with Me.”
December 12 [2015] is the 100th birthday of Frank Sinatra.
From Las Vegas to New Hope, Pennsylvania, fans are toasting Old Blue Eyes at black-tie dinner parties with Rat Pack entertainment. Siriusly Sinatra satellite radio is going wall-to-wall Frank. He is the star of the month on Turner Classic Movies.
Why do people continue to celebrate this man? Begin with his musical genius. As long as melody and harmony are valued, people will listen to, and dance to, and make love to the sounds of Sinatra.
The first of his nicknames was "The Voice." The young man's voice was incomparable in its power, timbre, range and agility. There are the songs he sang in the 1940s as the boy singer in the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands and when he went on his own and wowed the girls who rioted at the Paramount in New York City for a chance to hear Frankie. And there are the songs he sang in the 1950s when the voice deepened and he began to epitomize a grown-up masculine ideal.
In the first category the songs include "All or Nothing at All," "I'll Never Smile Again," "Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night in the Week," "Time After Time." In the second category: "You Make Me Feel So Young," "I've Got You under My Skin," "Witchcraft," "All the Way."
In the 1960s, the third decade of his dominance, Sinatra took swing to new heights with Count Basie ("Fly Me to the Moon"), dabbled in the Bossa Nova ("The Girl from Ipanema"), and made great songs sound like chapters in his own autobiography ("It Was a Very Good Year").
More often than not, it is Sinatra's version of a song that is definitive. He recognized that the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, Jimmy Van Heusen and many others had created classic American popular songs. By recording them, Sinatra renewed the life of great music.
Originally posted 12/12/15. Written for CNN. Reposted on the occasion of the paperback edition of "Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World."
Host Dan Crane tells the story of two strangers in the night, a bag full of cash, and a ship full of weapons bound for the fledgling state of Israel, in this special episode dedicated to Frank Sinatra’s Jewish activism. Guests: Anthony Summers, David Lehman, Shalom Goldman, Paul Karolyi, and Tony Michaels.
Sinatra planting a tree in Histadrut Forest of Jerusalem
Conservatives had a field day when FDR enlisted the Hoboken crooner who made girls faint. That was just the beginning for Sinatra. Here, an excerpt from David Lehman's Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, in book stores now.
The “Swoonatra” phenomenon reached its apex in the fall of 1944. When Sinatra performed at the Paramount Theater in New York that October, the throng of frenzied teenage girls—the so-called bobbysoxers—made mayhem in the streets. After a Sinatra performance—and Sinatra gave nine of them a day, starting at 8 in the morning—the girls refused to vacate their seats. Sometimes as few as 250 left theaters crowded with more than a dozen times that number. Police had to be called in. In what came to be known as the Columbus Day Riot, the bobbysoxers set in motion the pattern of behavior that marked the arrivals of Elvis Presley in 1956 and the Beatles eight years later. Having practiced their fainting techniques in advance, girls shrieked and swooned in bliss when the skinny vocalist bent a note in his patented way.
When Sinatra met Humphrey Bogart, the star of Casablanca andThe Maltese Falcon said that he’d heard Sinatra knew how to make women faint. “Make me faint,” Bogart said. Sinatra’s faint-inducing ability was also on the agenda when he met Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Fainting, which once was so prevalent, has become a lost art among the ladies,” the president told Sinatra in the White House on September 28. “I’m glad you have revived it.” Then the commander in chief asked Sinatra how he did it. “I wish to hell I knew,” Sinatra said.
The singer had wrangled the White House invitation when the Democratic Committee chairman asked his pal, the restaurateur Toots Shor, to a reception. FDR was glad to host Sinatra; it would counteract Bing Crosby’s endorsement of his opponent, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York, Roosevelt’s old job before he went to the White House. “Look who’s here,” Roosevelt exclaimed and asked the singer to confide the title of the song that would be No. 1 on the hit parade next week. “I won’t tell,” FDR grinned. “Amapola,” Sinatra said. (The title may have sounded Italian to the president—and Italy was an uncomfortable subject in wartime—so he switched the subject.) The meeting went well, though the president was said afterward to scratch his head in wonderment at the idea that the skinny crooner had revived what he called “the charming art of fainting.” “He would never have made them swoon in our day,” he told an aide after the party broke up.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
