The night I graduated high school I met her. I don't remember by whom, but I was invited to a dinner at a restaurant to celebrate graduating and she and I were seated together. I had seen her in school, but we were in different section and I had never met or paid her any mind. I didn't pay her much mind that night either. We chatted. It was pleasant. She invited me to visit her at her home, said she had a pool, come over for a swim. I said I would.
I almost didn't, but felt obligated. I called her number and she invited me the next Saturday.
That Saturday was a beautiful, warm, late June day, with blue sky and a breeze. I drove to her place and she lived back from the road down a long and lovely driveway. I crossed a bridge just before her house. It crossed a stream, which had been dammed up to create the pool she spoke of.
As I got out of my car, she came out of the house. There was music playing on the patio, a Tchaikovsky piece. She was wearing a blue bathing suit and as we got closer her perfume came on the breeze and surrounded me. The same wind tossed her natural blond hair about and I was instantly smitten. I was strongly in love. (I wish someone had taken a picture of her that day.)
We swam, we ate, we began to date. Eventually we went separate way and that broke my heart.
I torn her picture in half when we did, but later regretted it and taped the photo back together. (Her name was Sonja and she always reminded me of the Ice Skater-Actress, Sonia Henie - on the right.)
After the several months we were a couple, as she started to ditch me for another, I wrote a musical play to impress her. It was called, Ya-Ha-Whoey! The title came from an expression uttered by the Walt Disney cartoon character Goofy each time he fell. My friend Stuart and I had a few years earlier written a song of the same title. I would now use the song in my play. Both concerned falling in one manner or other.
Although I wrote several new songs for my play, some were ones I had composed earlier which I adapted to my plot, such as "Ya-Ha-Whoey" the song. I used my published song, "My Little White Lamb", for instance.
Anyway, the play did not impress and she did not fly back into my arms saying what a foolish girl she had been to ever consider another. It may sound sad, but that proved a happy ending for me, even if I didn't think so at the time.
Besides "My Little White Lamb", there were two other songs in the play that got around. Portions of each were incorporated into a stand-up comic routine I was performing as "Frantic Frank" (pictured on the right) at school and church in the area. These were "Yum-Ye-Ye-Yum" and "Lonely Boy".
Both of these were written in 1959 and specifically for the play. In the play there is a minor character named Gone Gabby Goober. he is a popular rock 'n' roll singer. "Yum-Ye-Ye-Yum" was a parody of rock music and supposedly one of Goober's big hits.
"Lonely Boy" was a self-pitying paean sung by one of the lead characters, Frederick Hilborn, early in Act I.
Besides these two songs, or at least a few lyrics from them, being performed here and there, they also got around in my books. Both are in the play, Ya-Ha-Whoey!, in the collection, Besotted Ballads Volume One and partially in Little Plays (the comic routine). Now they get further around since I have posted them on the Blossoms & Weeds page.
2 comments:
Excellent! I remember that winding road back to Sonia's well. Do you know where she is today? I had a girlfriend like Sonia in high school as well. Years later I ran into her brother. I asked about her. He said she was fat and had five kids. Bye!
I don't know where she is now. She stopped coming to the Class Reunions decades back. At the last one she attended, which might have been the tenth, she had put on a lot of weight. Last I heard, she was living alone in St. Peters Village and as far as I know she never married.
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