Skip to main content

The Perils of Giving "The Lonely Goatherd" the Method Treatment...





  Yesterday I watched - and loved - the live broadcast of The Sound and Music. 
  'Finally!' Rukan al Daher commented when I told her. 'I've been waiting to chew it over with you. Surely you didn't love the simplified performance of "The Lonely Goatherd"? You were so strict with us studying that song at Guildford.'
  I remember...

  'Your yodeling isn't nearly specific enough, Rukan,' I had begun by saying, sometime in the summer term, nineteen ninety-three. 'The goatherd is lonely. You just sound poised. Beautifully poised, but not lonely.'
  Rukan was a friend of the Saudi Arabian royal family and these days can be seen introducing the Jordanian Eurovision entry. She had another go at sounding lonely in her yodeling. 
  'Excellent.  Real sense of isolation,' I said, vamping along on the damp-ridden piano in the Founder's Studio. 'Er... why are you sounding upper-class now?'
  'Prince on the bridge, love; I was trying for regal.'
  'But the prince isn't yodeling on the bridge, he's just bystanding on it, overhearing.'
  'Good point.'
  She sang on. 
  'Okay, okay...yup. But listen: now, our goatherd is directly addressing - as opposed to being overheard by - the one little girl in the pale pink coat. She yodels back and but one yodeling chorus later, has a child by him. So, let's please have our goatherd sounding ball-quiveringly randy.'  
  Her glance fell on the dictaphone with which she recorded all her tutorials at Guildford.
  'Iestyn, I have to transcribe this tape, and give my notes to the official sponsors back home, showing that I've been using state money wisely and that I've not been disregarding let alone offending religious law. So, my goatherd's yodeling will just have to sound like his family and the mama with the gleaming gloat have got together previously and drawn up a mutually beneficial betrothal contract, acceptable in the sight of God.'  She pointed a forefinger at me. 'I like the soles of my feet unwhipped, thanks.'
  
  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Me Featuring in The Sunday Times, Nicely...

  This happened. The editor thinks it's a book of dog sitter stories waiting to happen. I am scribbling away at same...  I first house-sat by accident. I was originally at Haven House, Lembton, as a live-in safety net for Lady Olive Simmonds, a seventy-nine year-old Bostonian with a lilac afro, a Temazepam habit and leg ulcers. Haven House was by the sea. Eighteenth century, elegant, comfortable.  But there was Olive... Always in pain; either drunk, hungover or both; barely educated. She had married a man who was knighted, and believed this gave her a licence to be a twat. According to Olive, her fellow Lembtonians were all dull academics - this group having reading ages older than hers, which was thirteen - or failed schizophrenics. She had serious monophobia, with staff working (unnecessarily) every day apart from weekends. At weekends, first thing, anxious, she would ring round the Lembtonians that were still speaking to her - six in number - inviting them for coffee, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Marine Says I Must Re-queer...

                                                                 Being camp in Camp Basra... Stacks, ex-Royal Marines Commando, recently watched my Tutu Went AWOL! show on Zoom. He had notes. I was shifting from foot to foot, he said, and gesturing too much. 'And you must put back the stuff about the Brigadier and your fellow comedian being homophobic...' The Brigadier had been sneering about my act, saying it would be more suited to Butlins. But, more importantly, he believed I was an 'inappropriate influence on 42 Commando'.  Stacks, deadpan, commented, 'Sir, before Iestyn started hanging out with us, sir, it had never occurred to him to play Tiddlywinks with anything other than his thumb, sir.'  My fellow comedian, who I'll call Mark, because that's his name, asked Reg, Garrison Sergeant Major, in front of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

I Love the Library

                            Therese, soprano, never uses a library. ‘Oh, no, Iestyn. Unlike you, I pride myself on always buying my books.’ I agree with Helene Hanff, who said that buying a book you haven’t read is like buying a dress without trying it on. ‘How do you know the dress will fit, Therese?’ I asked. ‘I always know what’s going to fit me, book-wisely speaking. I tune into asking the universe what it needs me to read for the greater good, go into the bookshop and find that I’m drawn to a department, then a section of carpet, then the particular shelf and there will book the book, in a sort of outline of almost light picked out from the others around it.’ ‘But there are billions of books out there, Therese, in umpteen shops, divided into squillions of bits of carpet and…’ She was giving me her look: a nurse at my hospital bed telling me the prognosis was far from ideal. ‘Yes, but with me it’s narrowed down q...
1 comment
Read more