{"id":89473,"date":"2015-09-03T13:01:48","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T17:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89473"},"modified":"2015-09-03T13:02:15","modified_gmt":"2015-09-03T17:02:15","slug":"the-waiting-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/03\/the-waiting-game\/","title":{"rendered":"The Waiting Game"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The first release of \u201cSeptember Song.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

One of my \u201cparlor tricks,\u201d if such you can call it, used to be performing the Kurt Weill standard \u201cSeptember Song<\/a>\u201d in the voice of Lotte Lenya. I can\u2019t pretend anyone ever requested<\/em> this, per se, but from the ages of fifteen to about twenty-one, I broke into it on the slightest pretext. Among other things, the rendition was very loud. No record exists of my performances: small mercies, et cetera.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeptember Song\u201d was famously written for Walter Huston\u2019s limited vocal range, and his initial rendition\u2014as an elderly Peter Stuyvesant in 1938\u2019s\u00a0Knickerbocker Holiday<\/em>\u2014remains, for many, the most poignant. (To anyone who would laugh at the thought of a seventeenth-century Dutch colonist singing one of musical theater\u2019s great laments on aging, I would merely point out that \u201cMemory\u201d is performed by an anguished cat.) My grandfather always talked about first hearing the song when Walter Huston visited the radio program for which he was a writer in 1938. He cried, he said. When he died, it was sung at his funeral. <\/p>\n

Since its debut, it\u2019s seen renditions from Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Jimmy Durante, plus Peter, Paul and Mary, James Brown, and Lou Reed. They all bring something unique to it\u2014though\u00a0it should be pointed out that, in its original form, the song is somewhat less elegiac than the version most of us know today. The introduction is gendered and slightly silly\u2014at least relative to the melancholy of the chorus:<\/p>\n

\n

When I was a young man courting the girls
I\u00a0played\u00a0me a waiting game
If a maid refused me with tossing curls
I\u2019d let the old Earth make a couple of whirls
While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls
And as time came around she came my way
As time came around, she came<\/p>\n

When you meet with the young girls early in the Spring
You court them in song and rhyme
They answer with words and a clover ring
But if you could examine the goods they bring
They have little to offer but the songs they sing
And the plentiful waste of time of day
A plentiful waste of time<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So it\u2019s no surprise that many versions\u2014particularly those performed by women\u2014cut straight to the chorus:<\/p>\n

\n

Oh, it\u2019s a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn\u2019t got time for the waiting game
Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few September, November
And these few precious days I\u2019ll spend with you
These precious days I\u2019ll spend with you<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lotte Lenya recorded her most famous version<\/a> in 1957, several years after her husband Weill\u2019s death. I loved it; I played the record it over and over in the book-lined second-floor guest room, crying. I was so fiercely moved by it that I had to rob it of its power.<\/p>\n

One of the most painful things about being young is the knowledge that you are young. You feel<\/em> privately that every song is about you; you know<\/em> most of them are not. Everything feels like rash presumption. (Many things\u2014notably Sondheim songs\u2014are simply not options.) And yet, I felt \u201cSeptember Song\u201d\u00a0<\/em>in my marrow, even though it was about a dying old man and I was a teenage girl. So my longing knew no expression but a burlesque of feeling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Only two people enjoyed this: my grandfather and a guy I met in college who found it so delightful that he wrote the part of a cheeky old woman for me in an original student musical based on a medieval manuscript, which then I had to play. So really, I got my just deserts, and I didn\u2019t ever do it again after that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my \u201cparlor tricks,\u201d if such you can call it, used to be performing the Kurt Weill standard \u201cSeptember Song\u201d in the voice of Lotte Lenya. I can\u2019t pretend anyone ever requested this, per se, but from the ages of fifteen to about twenty-one, I broke into it on the slightest pretext. Among other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[19341,19343,19340,46,5335,19339,13487,19342],"class_list":["post-89473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-knickerbocker-holiday","tag-kurt-weill","tag-lotte-lenya","tag-music","tag-musicals","tag-september-song","tag-songs","tag-walter-huston"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSeptember Song<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 3, 2015 \u2013 One of my \u201cparlor tricks,\u201d if such you can call it, used to be performing the Kurt Weill standard \u201cSeptember Song\u201d in the voice of Lotte Lenya. 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