Summertime and the livin’ is easy ...
Granted, I’m not Porgy. And my partner ain’t Bess. Fish may be jumpin’, but the cotton isn’t high in my part of Canada or anywhere else in our great nation.
But George Gershwin grew up in New York City. And Montreal is WAY north of cotton country. I know many more Pierres than Porgys.
And the only Bess I’ve ever encountered was my late mother’s maternal aunt. But Gershwinian heat, more musty than musical, has moved north. And I’m singing some seasonal songs.
(In the shower where no one has to hear an almost-76-year-old voice, emanating from a throat that started smoking in high school.) But back to the hot weather that’s steaming up to hockey country. In my distant youth, city heat was something my mother had to deal with.
A divorcée working as a bookkeeper in the Montreal garment industry (which still existed in the 1950s), my mother dispatched me to summer camp for July and August. The camp wasn’t fancy. No horses, no sailboats, no tennis courts.
But plenty of music. The little brats, myself included, did a good deal of warbling in front of campfires. There wasn’t a lot of Gershwin, but enough that I was into Porgy and Bess tunes at an early age.
And a lot of other music. My grandfather was an opera lover, and a fatherless little kid loved him. The great Metropolitan Opera was broadcast from New York.
My grandfather tuned in on a radio positioned on a counter in the kitchen. He tuned in. I hung out.
Neither my gr.