Airline terminals, as everyone knows, are designed to make people happy to board planes, and I was looking forward to mine as I approached the gate, and then I heard music. Cheerful music, tooting, like a mechanical ocarina. “Easter Parade”—the chorus. It came from a small pink plush rabbit standing on a glass display case in a souvenir shop across Concourse C from C-18. The rabbit, who could also march, had come to a dead end against a stack of boxes and stood there kicking it. I sat in the lounge by the gate and looked out the window across the dock and the taxi strip, and heard about twenty choruses of “Easter Parade” before I realized that the rabbit was battery-powered and wouldn’t wind down anytime soon. My watch showed 2:40. My plane was scheduled to go at 3:00. The effect of a short musical selection endlessly repeated is maddening, of course—an effect not contemplated by Irving Berlin when he penned the number for the Broadway revue As Thousands Cheer, to be first warbled by Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb (September 30, 1933), whence it scored big and became the title song of an M-G-M Garland-and-Astaire cinemusical, whence it became the pop Easter standard in America.
What do You think about We Are Still Married (2011)?
