Happy Warrior

A FEW years back in London, I caught a delightfully bad lounge act who, in contrast with the overwrought tremulous chanteuses one finds in the Oak Room and such these days, specialized in a blithely bouncy cheerfulness when it came to even the most lugubrious lyric. He sang the theme from M*A*S*Hyou remember, the TV show about the Korean War that was really about the Vietnam War and ran longer than the Hundred Years War. Johnny Mandel’s theme music was wistful and ambiguous on the sitcom, and accompanied by landing choppers. But in that little boîte in Knightsbridge, our singer was entirely unperturbed by the dark lessons of war. He shrugged off Mike Altman’s lyric with a careless finger-snappy breeziness:

Suicide is painless, It brings on many changes, And I can take or leave it if I please . . .

A FEW years back in London, I caught a delightfully bad lounge act who, in contrast with the overwrought tremulous chanteuses one finds in the Oak Room and such these days, specialized in a blithely bouncy cheerfulness when it came to even the most lugubrious lyric. He sang the theme from M*A*S*Hyou remember, the TV show about the Korean War that was really about the Vietnam War and ran longer than the Hundred Years War. Johnny Mandel’s theme music was wistful and ambiguous on the sitcom, and accompanied by landing choppers. But in that little boîte in Knightsbridge, our singer was entirely unperturbed by the dark lessons of war. He shrugged off Mike Altman’s lyric with a careless finger-snappy breeziness:

Suicide is painless, It brings on many changes, And I can take or leave it if I please . . .