I’m sure anyone who went to the recent Gordon Lightfoot concert hoped to hear “Sundown” and “If You Could Read My Mind” yet again rather than a tune Gordon banged out in the past year.
And I’m pretty sure that this same anyone didn’t go to the library the next day and check out a book he’d read oodles of times.
And I’m absolutely sure that if this anyone don’t pay me back those two yards he owes me, it’s going to get Cubist ugly.
Sorry. I need to keep my personal business out of my laugh-a-second column.
So back to the column mentioned afore.
I’m just like this anyone (who apparently has the scratch for concerts but not for me and I swear, O Best Ones, I won’t mention it again). I rarely read a book more than once, but if Elton John’s “Your Song” comes on the radio, I crank it up to 11 and me and Mrs. Cool Kid head-bang in the Honda.
Why is this?
I’m no rocket surgeon, but I figure it has to do with the difference between aural and ocular synapses. That, or alchemy.
I was mulling this recently while sitting on a mule, and I had a brain typhoon. Something that could save the struggling publishing industry.
Singing books!
I’ll let the huddled masses work out the details; the tech specs; the royalties; all that. The Cool Kid is an idea man (some would say an ideal man, but I wish they wouldn’t because it makes me blush).
But I know it will work, because I tested it. Minutes ago, I asked Mrs. Cool Kid if she remembered the financial advice Polonius gave Laertes in “Hamlet.”
She looked at me like I was the one who wrecked the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Then I started singing, “Neither a lender, nor a borrower be!”
She jumped in and we belted out, “Do not forget! Stay out of debt!”
There’s an episode of “Gilligan’s Island” where the castaways set “Hamlet” to music using the album collection Mr. Howell, for some reason, brought on the three-hour cruise.
If you saw it, I’m sure you can sing this: “I ask to be! Or not to be! And that is the question that I ask of me!”
Singing books — can’t fail!
And when they catch on, the Cool Kid fully expects to wet his beak the way Johnny Sacks always did on “The Sopranos.”