"Cowboys Real and Imagined" at the New Mexico Museum of Art as Seen by A Musical Comedy Lover

Life as a Musical Comedy

Back from our road trip, I’m reflecting on just why I enjoy life so much at the same time that I fail at it, and it occurs to me that one of the reasons that I fail at it is that I do just what I enjoy instead of what makes sense or leads to accomplishments and stamps of approval.  It’s kind of like the poem by Dorothy Parker:

“They say of me, and so they should,
It's doubtful if I come to good.
I see acquaintances and friends
Accumulating dividends
And making enviable names
In science, art and parlor games.
But I, despite expert advice,
Keep doing things I think are nice,
And though to good I never come
Inseparable my nose and thumb.”

I interpret “nice” to mean enjoyable and engaging, not good or kind. 

So here I am, back from a road trip to Santa Fe by way of the Cirque du Soleil in Nevada (which deserves individual attention under the heading of kitsch), the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, the beautiful home of friends in the enchanted forest in Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona, and what am I doing between thank you notes to the people in the enchanted forest?  Getting more info on Oklahoma and Annie Get Your Gun so I can share it with the guide at the New Mexico  History Museum, whose tour of “Cowboys:  Real and Imagined” I so much enjoyed.  Musicals always fit in so well with the imagined, and when he was talking about the conflict between the cowboys and the settlers, I couldn’t help thinking of the song  “The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK_gl9zke9o

Be sure to look this up because it’s very well-done, and it’s fun seeing Aunt Eller directing their singing with a pistol in her hand, which brings us to “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun” from Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun—a bit later.

By the way, this may not seem like an extension of my blog on my mother, but in a way it is.  Daddy took her to see Oklahoma soon after it came out in 1943, and she was so exuberant about it that he was embarrassed.  He thought she was overdoing it.  If there were every a musical that deserved excessive exuberance, Oklahoma is it!