Growing Up with Music and Dance

After exploring with you the books of my child- and adulthood, I’d like to take another trip down memory lane and explore music. It’s been part of my life since childhood because my mother sang as she did every household chore and as she sat, playing solitaire, in the the living-room easy chair we called “Mom’s chair.”

She had an old Ouija/Weejee board that she used for solitaire. She’d place it across her lap and deal out the cards. As she moved one row to another, she’d be singing a popular song from the 1920s, ‘30s, or ‘40s. Her voice was a rich, clear soprano, and she had an instinct for phrasing the lyrics. Mom would sometimes sing along with music on the radio, but most often, she sang solo as she went about her day.

Listening to her sing, I learned all the words and melodies to Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess.” I also memorized and sang songs by Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and many others.

(There's a lot of music before you get to the words, but it's worth the wait!)

When I was little—a toddler—my dad sang to me each night. Our favorite song was “Dream Train.” The words, as I remember them, were “Dream train, please carry me back. Dream train, stay on the right track. . . . Stop when a sweet old lady holler’s ‘Welcome, my dream train!’” I felt so safe each night with the covers tucked around me and Dad singing. I could see the train and the track that was carrying me to dreamland.

In school, also, we learned songs like “I’m a Little Teapot.” The one I remember best is from first-grade. Ms. MacMillan taught us “A Little Ducky-Duddle.” The words go: “A little ducky-duddle was wadding in a puddle. Was wading in a puddle quite small. Said he, ‘It doesn’t matter, how much I splash and splutter. I’m only a ducky after all. I’m only a ducky after all.”

Ms. MacMillan taught us words, melody, and accompanying actions. I can still—with my voice taking on the sing-song lisp of a first-grader—act out this song. My doing so has delighted all the young children whom I have loved as an adult. (I think it has also embarrassed the adults who were those children’s parents!)

Both my brother and I learned to sing by listening to Mom and Dad harmonize. They would sometimes sing songs like “Daisy! Daisy,” “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home,” or “Casey Would Waltz with a Strawberry Blond” from the early part of the 20^th century.  Sometimes they’d dance as they sang and my brother—who was three years young than I—would prance around the living room. Then the two of us would put on our own show, imitating the dance moves of our mom and dad.

As the years passed, I learned songs from Hollywood musicals like “The Bells of Saint Mary’s” and “Going My Way.” The radio and the movie theater brought us many memorable songs. Later, on TV’s “Ed Sullivan Show,” we saw the artists who had introduced a song—Elvis singing “Hound Dog,” Nat King Cole singing “When I Fall in Love,” Peggy Lee singing “It’s a Good Day.” At the movies, we saw the Broadway musicals that became Hollywood hits: “South Pacific,” “Carousel,” “Oklahoma,” “Brigadoon,” and “My Fair Lady.”

Music made my feet waltz and polka, fox-trot and tango. In the 7^th grade, Sister Mary McAuley taught us how to do those dances; at the high school mixers our class danced up a storm.

So for the 22 years before I entered the convent, I sang and danced. Singing became a way of coping with my father’s alcoholism. Dancing became a way to whisk myself into another world—a dreamland.