Half a Song, Half a Song, Half a Song Onward!

Last Saturday afternoon, I did a bit of furniture-shopping in SoHo with a Not Impossible She and a couple of her cronies. We had stopped to rest and recuperate at a local watering hole, featuring a chandelier composed of unwashed paint brushes and a crazy space-age karzy.

As the Campari and iced coffee flowed, one of the cronies (and the excuse for the expedition) happened to speak of getting gum on one's shoe, whereupon a song from 1932, A Shine on Your Shoes, by Dietz and Schwartz, popped into my head. And, believe you me, that took some popping, for I don't know the song from Adam's off ox.

When I got home that night, I pulled the sheet music down from the shelf, and managed to commit the first half of it to memory; but I still draw a blank on the release and the truncated ending. (O! Mnemosyne, thou bitch!) But to return to the res:

This morning, on the way to the office, the first sixteen bars wrote themselves; and, while I prefer not to post half-efforts here, the output has been so slim of late that anything's better than nothing:

When you get gum on your shoe,
It's a harbinger of your day,
And you get the uneasy feeling
That nothing 'll go your way;

So you arrive at your job
In a bit of a browned-off mood,
Take a look at your bulging inbox—
And suddenly know you're screwed.

Lyric © 2007 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov

Watch this space for further developments.