Hello Dolly and Story Time

This will be a bit odd of a post for me (and a relatively short one) because I am not really much of a show tunes person and not really even particularly much of a musicals person, although I do like a couple of musicals very much. My dad was into all kinds of musicals. Oklahoma never bothered me but never floated my boat particularly. I don't remember him being particularly into South Pacific, and when I saw a production of it as the semester's theater production in undergrad, I thought "exactly how many times are they going to reprise 'Some Enchanted Evening'?" He loved Fiddler on the Roof, and I think it is pretty near mystical. I don't remember him particularly getting into Sound of Music, or at least being particularly vocal about loving it, but I also think that is nearly mystical (great bill of really good songs with not much repeat, and what there is is not as much reprise as well-crafted linkage, like Fiddler). He loved The Music Man with Robert Preston and Shirley Jones, and I thought I remembered liking it, but when I went back and rewatched it sometime in the past few years, I discovered that, while I still like some of the tunes, I made it only about halfway through the overall because it gave me a feel of some kind of morbid curiosity that it's hard for me to describe (Buddy Hackett's number has the ideal girl being some midpoint between prude and "hussy" that is at best boring to me as not being actual personality; there's a tinge of some kind of the same spectrum in "Madame Librarian," and especially, the older generation will always be fuddy duddy to the younger, maybe lovable and loved, but still locked in that basic matrix ... I can't explain it, but it strikes me as the same general morbid curiosity with mediocrity that I think of A Christmas Story, for all its admittedly fun quotable lines, as being). It's kind of hit and miss on what Dad was into and what I like (and I have absolutely no clue on the distinctives of Rogers and Hammerstein versus others and all those things that aficionados know all about).

But one of his absolute favorites has recently come back around for me, which is Hello Dolly. As I said, I am not much of a show tunes person, and even while watching it on the elliptical machine at home (during which times I will usually sit through a lot just to make sure to have enough material to do at least a certain amount of time on the machine), I fast-forwarded through some of the dance numbers that seemed to be dragging on a bit for me  (I knew it was 2.5 hours, so I knew I had some leeway, because not even on my most hardcore times on the elliptical will I go that long ... actually I still had to finish it off after I got back from a 4th viewing of Last Jedi, but I did that on the TV in my room, not the elliptical in the basement). But on the count of being "wholesome," for all that some people think of the city and the urbane as being "liberal" or naughty, I would pit Hello Dolly's straight up romanticism against what I just described as Music Man's morbid curiosity any day of the week.

(SIDENOTE: Of course, some of liking Hello Dolly better is that I lived in NYC for 8 years and miss it, and can tell you that that early scene is actually shot either in Grand Central Station itself or in an accurately done replica, and that the film is accurate in that the way to get to Yonkers is to take the Hudson line of the Metro North, which runs out of Grand Central, and those shots of the train on the Hudson river are very accurate for that line, which I know from taking the green/Hudson line a couple times up to Poughkeepsie ... I was through Grand Central a lot in 8 years ... 22-minute ride between Fordham Rd station and Grand Central terminal on the Harlem line [New Haven line also goes through that station but you can get on only going north] at off peak ... but to get from Fordham Rd to Poukeepsie, you had to take the Harlem line down to 125 St in Manhattan and change to the green/Hudson line, or at least I never found a time when the green line actually stopped at its station by university heights right by the 207th st bridge, which I tried to find a couple other times to try to go up to check out "breakneck ridge" and Bear Mountain for hiking ... anyway ... now on from the reminiscing ... *heavy sigh* ... END SIDIENOTE).

The reason I had a desire to watch Hello Dolly recently was that I have recently rewatched Pixar's Wall-E with a friend's family for their Sunday family movie ... and I absolutely love Wall-E, which is for me part of a power trio (Incredibles, Wall-E, and Up, the last two being back to back, and separated from Incredibles by only four years ... and saying they are extra good even within Pixar's body of work is saying a lot, because Pixar remains consistently good) ... and Wall-E uses Hello Dolly to great effect. So I though should go back and watch it.

And I liked it a lot (although, as I said, I fast-forwarded through some of the longer dance numbers). But, in and of itself, given that it's a show tunes musical, that's not really a reason to write about it on this blog (I love the movie Premium Rush with Joseph Gordon-levitt too because I love biking in NYC traffic and the movie captures the rush of it so well, but I don't really have anything to say about it on this blog). The part that makes me give Hello Dolly honorable mention on this blog is a line in one of the songs that Wall-E actually uses (not one of the lines Wall-E used, but they use the song) that connects with other stuff I have written on this blog.

One of my core posts on this blog is my post on "story time," in which I talk about my definition of narrative as a "kairotic chronology," an intersection of two concepts of time in Greek. Chronos is clock time, scientifically quantified time. Kairos is "loaded" time, time in which the content/quality is not dependent on the quantity. The latter is used int he Bible for conceptually-loaded liturgical seasons (the "in the fullness of time" line in Paul is the Greek word Kairos, and the example I give from Genesis 1 is "days and years" as chronos terms and "signs and seasons" as kairos terms ... in fact, that is the exact word used in the Greek Septuagint version of the text for "seasons"). And we still have the same sort of thing even without having different words for it: when we say "Advent," we mean a whole lot more than "the four weeks in December"; we mean the symbolism of expectation and hope in the coming(s) of Christ (even from the "pagan" angle, "solstice" is more about hope of life in the midst of the coldness of winter than it is about the quantifiably shortest amount of daylight ... but please recall from that post that I am not knocking chronos in and of itself, and I would knock only isolating it as the core defining aspect of time ... which is basically the core problem that literal six-day creationism has in accepting the categories and thinking of scientism and applying them to Genesis in an attempt to beat science "on its own grounds").

So, I had a broad smile on my face at the introduction to the "It Only Takes a Moment" song toward the end of Hello Dolly when I realized that it fit these ideas of time so well. The policeman asks, incredulously, whether Cornelius Hackle is serious in saying that, after twenty-eight and three quarter years alone, he fell in love with Irene Molloy in one day. And Cornelius replies that, no, it wasn't even that long. It wasn't even an hour. And somebody suggests, "a second?" And he again replies, "no." And finally somebody suggests, " a moment?" And he says "that's it." And the central line (which they use awesomely in Wall-E for the robot hand-holding scenes) is: "It only takes a moment to be loved a whole life long." That difference between a second and a "moment" (in which one can be loved a whole life long) is precisely the difference difference between chronos and kairos. In using it for the romantic, they nailed it dead on, probably without even realizing it or that it would excite some nerd who would connect it with dry ancient philosophical terms :)