It’s simple, really: when I’m feeling intolerably blue, when the skies cannot seem to shed that husk of gray and the sun is merely a dim memory, and when all of life feels hollow and miserable, I turn to movies. And one in particular, one that conjures up better days and reminds me of people that I love, like my Grandmother Schilling, my father, friends, and the three transvesitites I sat behind, who, at the Oak Street Cinema, wept with joy at the close of this favorite. These people all laughed with me and our spirits were saved when Gene Kelley and Donald O’Connor sang:
Moses supposes his toeses are roses
but Moses supposes erroneously
and Moses he knowses his toeses aren’t roses
as Moses supposes his toeses to be…
and danced circles around Bobby Watson, the fussbudget diction coach while yelling “Hupidubidu! “
Of course, that movie is Singin’ in the Rain.
It is nearly impossible not to laugh at that scene, or Jean Hagen trying to say “I cann stann ’em” to her diction coach. Or O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” sequence (and his terrifying backflips, which don’t work on mattresses turned on their sides… trust me on that one). Or Kelley’s Don Lockwood earnestly going on about ‘Dignity”, when we know better… Or any number of the moments in this beautiful film.
Betty Comden, who with Adolph Green, wrote this silly and sublime masterpiece, died on Thanksgiving Day. Apparently, they enjoyed an amazing career, writing a string of muscial hits for MGM and Broadway, collaborating for nearly six decades. But if they never did anything but write Singin’ in the Rain, well, it goes without saying that they gave us a present that will last as long as there are movies.
For that gift of laughter, for the gift of making the people I care for laugh, I am eternally grateful.
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