S A T U R D A Y J U L Y 4th was Full Buck Moon. Google it. It prompted me to write about the moon. But I had already written about the moon 15 years ago:
“[Tuesday, October 17, 2005] was full moon so I listened to Peggy Lee singing Full Moon. She was discovered by Benny Goodman in 1937, at age 17. Those good old days! The 30’s! Over a candlelight brunch [on Sunday, October 15th] at my friend John’s house near McGinley Square, in New Jersey, he and I decided that the 30’s would be the decade to spend our reincarnated adulthood. Do you believe in reincarnation?
We would wear our tuxedos frequently, go to the première of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at the Alvin Theater (October, 10th, 1935) and afterwards to the Central Park Casino for a few hands of jack. I —not John, he doesn’t smoke— could finally smoke a Cuban cigar indoors, maybe with Gershwin, himself a hardcore smoker. An earlier stop at Tiffany’s to purchase our matching newly released T-ball point silver pens (Ball point pens were invented by Laszlo Biro in the 30’s). On our way back home the next day, we would cross the river in the new bridge connecting Manhattan with New Jersey —the George Washington Bridge, inaugurated in 1931— and attend a matinée of the Marx Brother’s 1932 Horsefeathers at the Loews Theater in Journal Square. Did I mention a late nightcap at the Morocco listening to Ernesto Lecuona and his Cuban Boys doing rhumbas, my favorite ballroom dance? The daydream ended in our Peugeot 402 Lègere, as John was singing while driving: “… and then there may be teardrops to shed. So while there’s moonlight and music, and love, and romance, let’s face the music and dance!”
Let me close this Moon Momment with a quote from a play by Peter Brook: “There is my truth, your truth, and the Truth. The Truth is a perfect circle (le grand circle de la verité) like the moon. Your truth and my truth are crescent moons, converging and diverging but only the Truth is the Full Moon.”
— adapted and rewritten, slightly, in New York City during Phase 3, 7/7/2020
(*) Originally published as a Musikmomment, October 17, 2005. © Raúl Rodriguez, Musikmomments, originally Musikomments, Musical Interludes before the merger (1997-2004), initially and innocently called Musical Intercourses (2003)