Memories

MEMORIES

Fred Astaire singing "S’wonderful" to Audrey Hepburn in Daddy Longlegs and I nearly lost it. What flooded in on me were more than memories, they were chronicles, a catalogue of where I’d been and what I’d done. The trap of getting older is to weep for what used to be.

Turner Classic Movies should be out-of-bounds for anyone over the age of 60. I’m convinced that this wallowing in the past is counterproductive. It adds to the years which become a burden more than a bounty.

And I do like to think of my own past as something of a bounty. It is the spring from which flows much more than memories. From it flows what I hope are new ideas, new horizons, new challenges.

Alas, it was everything I remember coming from people long gone. From Astaire with Rogers – "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," "All my Eggs in One Basket." With Gene Kelly resurrecting old Gershwin songs. Even an old black and white kinescope of the Oscar Levant show where Levant races through "Lady Be Good" and Astaire puffs and pants to keep up the tempo.

And they are all gone. All of them but me – and you..

As a watched I wondered what anyone of the 20-something or 30-something group would think. Did they care? Was it utterly irrelevant? Did they really want to see Judy and Fred doing their two tramp song and dance from "Easter Parade?"

I don’t think so. To them it is what all of the fogeys are about. To them it does not have the ring of rock “n roll. But to that generation, Disco is yesterday.

So I teared up a little. I sang along. I remembered being ten years old when Rogers and Astaire went "Flying Down To Rio." I remember being a teenager when Fred did that horrible movie about being in the army and played opposite the devastatingly beautiful Rita Hayworth.

I was grown up with a small family when he did "Silk Stockings" with Cyd Charisse.

So what’s all the fuss about? Is this kind of nostalgia self-defeating? Does it give me an alternative to “Looking Ahead” – which is what my blog is supposed to be all about.

Dunno.