Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea

100 years ago tonight the Titanic sank.


The RMS Titanic, that spectacular metaphor for nature’s ultimate rebuke to mankind and, along with World War I, the death of the rigid class system of the Edwardian era. Or, as The Onion puts it more succinctly: 

Titanic’s hold on our imagination is undeniable and only seems to get stronger as time passes—in one year (1996-1997) no fewer than three major adaptations of the story came out! 

• Maury Yeston's Broadway musical Titanic (the very first Broadway musical I ever saw!)
• a TV miniseries
• and of course James Cameron’s leviathan hit.

I first became interested in the disaster when, as a child, I read Richard Peck’s modern juvenile classic Ghosts I Have Been, a crucial plot point of which involves a heart-breaking (albeit fictional) incident wherein a young English boy’s parents have abandoned their son in his cabin to save themselves. Peck even has the father, Sir Poindexter, claim a spot in the lifeboats by dressing as a woman, in a clear reference to this Titanic legend. The book's eerie refrain of "iron against ice” and the tender moment between young Julian and the main character Blossom, summoned from the near-future to bear witness and comfort the boy, stayed with me. 

And Peck’s scenario is not impossible--one child in First Class was known to have died on the Titanic.  
Sadly the children in steerage died in droves.

I’ve written before about the special horror of dying in cold water—but Titanic's passengers had a somewhat different experience than those on Flight 90.  They had time to prepare for their deaths--time to deny, to rationalize, to fear, to fight it, to come to grips, to greet it with dignity. Time to say goodbye, or to make a choice, as the Strausses did, to embrace death together. "Where you go, I go." And one more poetic, heart-breaking difference--they died at night, far from home, and most of their bodies were not recovered.



A few years after reading Ghosts I Have Been, I came across another book, this treasure, written by 2 experts who were used as consultants on the ’97 film.  LOVE this volume—lots of photographs, marvelously detailed illustrations and, fascinatingly, a picture taken the next day of what may have been the actual iceberg that struck the ship.

Yes, that mark on the right is said to have been from the ship.  Great article here looks at the evidence.

As for that iceberg—why exactly did the great ship hit? The major human factor was hubris—the owner, J. Bruce Ismay, wanted publicity for the maiden crossing, and so pushed the captain to go faster. Even so this likely would not have been a problem had the weather conditions been slightly different. The musical's Act One finale sums it up neatly in one verse, as the lookout sings:

"No Moon" from Maury Yeston's Titanic

No moon, no wind
No light to spy things by

No wave, no swell
No line where sea meets sky

Stillness, darkness
Can't see a thing, says I

No reflection
Not a shadow
Not a glint of light
Meets the eye...

And we go sailing
Sailing
Ever westward on the sea… 
No moonlight to see the 'bergs. And no wind, which would make the water break against the ice. They were flying blind, going at a breakneck pace [westward of course, which = death in Freudian symbolism] with no radar and almost no visibility, only their faith in the invincibility of Titanic’s design, in steel and ingenuity, in man's manifest supremacy over nature, to protect them.

There’s actually some disagreement on the band’s final song—originally some passengers remembered it as “Nearer, My God, to Thee” but Harold Bride recalled hearing “Autumn” across the water.  But was it the Episcopalian hymn or the French tune, "Songe d'Autumne"?  The musical takes this idea and runs with it—they composed a new song:

Autumn
Shall we all meet in the Autumn?
Golden and glowing by Autumn
Shall we still be best of friends?
Best of friends...

Whose melody is also heard in the background later in the second act, during the final scramble to the lifeboats.

I’m not crazy about Cameron’s film* although I enjoy a great deal of it (and parts of it are genuinely glorious). But one of my favorite moments is when the musicians, having been released from their duties, wordlessly regroup for one last time for “Nearer, My God, to Thee”—the violin sending out those sweet, familiar strains, comforting those about to die, bestowing a patina of grace over the panicked rush to survive at all costs, calling out to the lucky few in the boats Remember us. 


Remember us.









These men were heroes—they gave their lives to help keep the passengers calm during the evacuation. Not one of them survived.

I have an affinity for those musicians, since I (and, interestingly, my grandfather) also served on board a liner as a musician—in my case it was a cruise ship in and around the western Mediterranean. [Not much problem with icebergs there, although there were earthquakes in the east to worry about--thanks, Poseidon Adventure!].  Titanic certainly had made its mark on the industry—apparently bookings went way up after the movie came out! The design of the liner on which I served, the R2 of Renaissance Cruise Lines (a victim of the post-9/11 travel recession), was even inspired by the great ship:

Titanic's famous stairway.

The former R2, now the Regatta--yep, your favorite historian/singer/dancer used to traipse up and down these stairs!  I have a picture of the Entertainment Department somewhere which I'll upload soon...

I am finishing this up at exactly 2:20 am, when the great ship finally went under the waters.


Listen to their voices across the sea.  


Remember us.

*For someone who clearly cares so much about the great ship, you’d think Cameron** would try a little harder for historical accuracy—the women of Lifeboat 6 most certainly DID want to go back to save their husbands, and were threatened by the clearly terrified Quartermaster Hichens. In fact his nastiness in the lifeboat got so bad that eventually Molly Brown threatened to throw him overboard. Gotta love a (post-) Edwardian woman kickin’ ass and takin’ names.

**However I love that Cameron threw in a small reference to Chief Baker Joughin, the tippling crew member whose gin-soaked bloodstream was able, somehow, to keep him warm enough to survive TWO HOURS in the 28-degree water! The. Hell?! Most people in that water died within minutes! WASP blood chemistry, I tell you.

You Win or You Die

I have become addicted to the TV show Game of Thrones. I watched the premiere episode last spring and it didn’t quite grab me—but then someone told me that the source material (George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire) is actually based on the Wars of the Roses and I was All. Over. That!

So, some references are fairly obvious:
Stark = York, Lannister = Lancaster.  Westeros is essentially all of Europe, although more England than anything.  The Wall is Hadrian's Wall; the wildlings are probably the aboriginal Britons, the Celts who were driven out by the Roman troops.  The southern kingdoms seem to be sort of Aquitaine-ish, with all the flowers and sultry living.

Physically Westeros looks more like Scotland than England.
I wonder if that makes the Dothraki Irish!

Part of the fun of watching something like this is figuring out who is based on whom—and then examining how Martin upends those prototypes, or combines them with others. King Robert is clearly intended to be your basic Edward IV-type:

• heavy-set*
• drinks a lot
• whores around
• strong warrior who led a rebellion and supplanted a Mad King.

[And let me say, I called Robert’s death a loooong time ago, I had a feeling something dreadfully William Rufus-ish would happen to him. Know your fairy tales and STAY OUT of the Forbidden Forest!]

However.  Edward was a MUCH better king than Robert and his marriage to his eventual queen was certainly not the cold political alliance of Cersei and Robert. In fact Edward lost significant political support when he married Elizabeth Woodville [thoroughly pissing off his main backer, Warwick the Kingmaker, who ended up leading another rebellion AGAINST Edward and reinstating the previous King, Henry VI. The Wars of the Roses can be hellishly confusing—the timeline reads like a litany: …Henry VI, Edward IV, Henry VI, Edward IV…]. 

Poor Henry is the clearest parallel for Aerys the Mad King, but Henry’s insanity was pretty harmless stuff, mainly a lot of praying and swaying—he certainly wasn’t burning anyone alive!  [Henry did have an unfortunate habit of wandering off during important battles though…after the 2nd Battle of St. Albans they found him sitting under a tree singing.] 

Sorry blokes, d’you need me for something? Wot, I'm KING, how'd that happen?

So this seems to make Cersei the counterpart for Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s gorgeous, cold consort—but in her cool, straightforward bids for power, Cersei actually strikes me as more of a Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s Queen. Margaret, a fierce HBIC, led ARMIES, for God’s sake—there’s an hilariously disapproving account of her in Edward Hall’s Chronicles, courtesy of Richard Duke of York, frosty with frustrated battlefield chauvinism.

Gah!  How tackily unfeminine!

The Duke of York barely lived to regret his sneering words as Margaret's army promptly handed his ass to him in the Battle of Wakefield the next day, wiping out the Yorkists. Ol' Richard's head ended up decorating a gate outside his eponymous city, adorned with a paper crown saying "Let York overlook the town of York. "Oooh, that is COLD, Margaret!

Margaret had just one child, one precious son, Edward of Lancaster, the Prince of Wales, of whose birthright she was extremely protective. 

Mummy, how come everyone says I look so much like Uncle Jaime the Duke of Somerset?

Like Cersei’s Joffrey [and Paul I, Catherine the Great’s only child who almost certainly was not fathered by her husband, the previous Tsar], Edward's paternity was questioned (delicately)—poor crazy, singing Henry didn’t really seem up to the task! Perhaps due to his somewhat unsettled childhood and his mother’s weird habit of consulting her son on how to execute prisoners, Edward was disturbingly precocious in his zest for York blood.  One foreign observer said the boy 

already talks of nothing but cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle or the peaceful occupant of that throne.

Edward would have been right at home in King's Landing!

But who is the Prince's analogue? In Game of Thrones, there are several candidates:

• That psychopath Joffrey, obviously.  Although Edward was never THAT sadistic;  frankly Joffrey seems more like Caligula!
• Robin, the bloodthirsty heir of Eyrie, who likes to see prisoners “fly!”--out the window and down a 1000-foot drop. However as attached as Edward might have been to his formidable mother, he did NOT breastfeed to the age of 8. [My eyes!]
• Vicerys, the pretender to the Iron Throne, who like Edward maintained a court in exile after fleeing his homeland as a child.

As for all the incest?  I got nothing.  The Lancasters and the Yorks didn't really keep it in the family a la the Ptolemys--the one possible exception is the rumor that Richard III was seeking to marry his niece Elizabeth of York after his first wife died.  The English didn't really go for that sort of tackiness, though.  The Habsburgs, however...**

*Henry VIII, Edward’s grandson, strongly resembled Edward, both physically and in personality. Both were stunning physical specimens in youth—tall, fair, athletic—with significant weight gain in later life; both were charming but absolutely draconian when they had to be.


**I have been meaning to do an entry on the most notorious member of that unbelievably inbred family, Carlos el Hechizado--the Bewitched.  He was his own cousin MANY times over and the results weren't pretty.

Medieval Treasures, Part I

This past Christmas, while visiting the Washington DC area, I was blessed with an embarrassment of riches, a medieval two-fer. The first was like something out of a Tolkien dream, a priceless hoard of precious metals and ornaments from the Dark Ages, found lying beneath the earth; the second, a long-lost text from the 10th century whose story reads like a Gaston Leroux novel by way of Dan Brown.

Part I
Sic transit gloria Angli...

In July of 2009 [coincidentally right before I visited London for my first extended visit], an enormous hoard of gold and silver was dug up in Staffordshire, England. As it turned out the treasure dated back to the Anglo-Saxon era—a Sutton Hoo for the new millennium! I was dying to view the loot when I was actually over there, but the experts were still cleaning it up and had not put it on public display yet—I had to wait until the Brits brought it over here, to be exhibited at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC.

Thankfully they were open on Christmas Eve, since that was the only day I could go! Walking into the exhibit hall was like entering Smaug's cavern. I couldn't stop staring at these pieces.  They were breathtaking—incredibly detailed, dazzling and golden and captivating.  And mysterious. Who buried this collection and when? And why? Who was the man who displayed these pommel atop his sword, the warrior who had first worn that helmet plate, what do we know about their violent, cold, vivid world?

The defender of earls then

Commanded that eight steeds with bridles

Gold-plated, gleaming, be guided to hallward

Inside the building; on one of them stood then

An art-broidered saddle embellished with jewels

The Anglo-Saxons predated what we think of as England*--they were only two of a number of Germanic tribes that surged into the power vacuum that was the British isles after Shit Started Getting Real in the Roman Empire in the early 400s and onward [when the Romans pulled out of Britain because their empire was busy falling apart. You know how it is]. Everyone knows the date 1066, when William the Conqueror [or the Bastard, if you prefer--he answered to both names] won the Battle of Hastings**...but there was nearly 700 hundred years between the pullout of the Romans, and the appearance of the Normans [who were really Vikings just a few generations removed***]. What happened in the intervening years?

Well, an awful lot of fighting, mainly. The Germanic tribes--the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Frisians, all swept across the North Sea like a cold wind, all part of what the Germans call the Völkerwanderung, the Migration of Peoples, a long, long period from the 400s AD to roughly 900 or so, when seemingly every people in Europe was infected with restlessness and had to move, to go, to invade, to conquer.

Two of these tribe (the Visigoths and the Vandals) sacked Rome--in the same century! Before that Rome hadn't been sacked for 800 years but by the 5th century, things had deteriorated so badly in the Empire that a horde of illiterate long-haired tribesmen was able to bring down the Caput Mundi.

What were they seeking? What were they trying to accomplish? What caused so many kind of peoples, so many tribes and clans and kindred to pick up and move across the landmasses of Europe?

No one really knows.

Which brings us back to this glittering, alluring pile of gold, the perfect fancy for these turbulent, hungry times. As vast as the hoard was [the largest EVER from the Anglo-Saxon period!], it offered only a few, tantalizing clues as to its origins. For one thing almost all the objects were military in purpose--no coins, no combs or belts or jewelry, just things like hilt collars, scabbards, helmet plates. For another--most intriguingly--almost none of the pieces were intact; many of them were deliciously mangled and even torn.

"The Folded Cross."  This may have been held aloft into battle, as religious artifacts often were. 

His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment 

and with the desire of dwarves; 

and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, 

at the gold beyond price and count.

Like Bilbo, I too was dazzled, my heart was caught by these lovely, delicate, intricately worked objects, precious pieces over which some anonymous, long-dead artisan had worked, imagining his hands twisting the thin strands onto the plates, shaping and polishing the garnets, creating a thing of beauty to last the ages. 

A hilt collar--this would have decorated a sword handle.

Imagining some fierce Danish or Welsh fighter grappling with an enemy, their swords clashing and rending the gorgeous metalwork.

Notice the eagle's head on the left, and the scales on the other end.
The Anglo-Saxons loved visual jokes and puns such as this.

Imagining too how these riches ended up sleeping beneath the earth for over 1ooo years...Perhaps some enterprising Mercian warrior, lucky enough to be on the winning side [the typical Anglo-Saxon practice was for all the losers to be slaughtered], crept out under cover of darkness to strip the bodies and hurriedly buried his stash, hoping to retrieve it later.

Four bright jewels with gold-work embellished.

'Round the roof of the helmet a head-guarder outside

Braided with wires, with bosses was furnished,

That swords-for-the-battle fight-hardened might fail

Boldly to harm him... 

Perhaps the gold was buried in tribute--to an enemy, to a god, perhaps in thanksgiving to a battle won...

No one knows.  

*Although they gave us their name--Angle-land.  According to legend, Pope Gregory eyed a group of fair-haired, fair-skinned slaves in the Roman marketplace and wanted to know their origins.  Upon being told they were Angles, he quipped Non Angli, sed Angeli.  Oh, Gregory, you so funny...

**Which, by the way, was the very LAST successful invasion of the British Isles.  Take THAT, Philip II and Hitler!


*** Norseman --> Norman, just another variation on the Big Incestuous Melting Pot of Northern Europe.

Two Flights, Two Rivers

A few weeks ago, January 13, was the 30^th anniversary of one of Washington DC’s saddest stories, the ill-fated Air Florida Flight 90.

I am the daughter of a commercial airline pilot (former Navy) and my family and I have always been hyper-aware of airplane crashes.  Having grown up in the DC area, I vividly remember this accident when it happened—the magnitude of the disaster stunned me.  A heavy snowstorm, the really wet, icy, messy kind in which the DC area seems to specialize.  14^th Street Bridge taken out.  78 people killed, mostly immediately.  In the water. They were never even really airborne, the plane just kind of lumbered into the air and flopped down into the river like a dodo bird, breaking through the ice and disappearing almost completely.

And worse and worse.  

• The federal government had released its employees early that day because of the storm, so the roads were packed with commuters—4 of the killed were on the bridge.

• Metro, the DC area’s subway system, had its first fatal accident that day—so the Orange and Blue Lines were both suspended.

The few passengers who survived the crash found themselves in the Potomac River—a dangerous river even in optimum conditions, it was now choked with ice floes.  Stunned, broken and literally freezing, they could do nothing to help themselves—they could only wait to be rescued.  And wait they did—the only way to reach the survivors was now either by air or by water.

There is something especially haunting about dying underwater—the claustrophobia, the dark, the horrible inversion of Freudian birth imagery.  And the river was cold, so cold.  The survivors had only minutes to spare before hyperthermia would kill them, and many were blind from the aviation fuel that now covered the surface of the river.  The helicopters arrived and hovered over and on the waters, throwing down rescue lines to tow the people to shore.  At one point the skids of the 'copter went below the surface.

Bystanders on the bridge and the riverbanks were shouting encouragement to the flailing survivors.  Hold on, just hold on.  Help is coming.  Stay strong.  The river was so narrow, the survivors so close, everyone could see them easily--you could feel their struggles, you could read the expressions on their faces. 

Eventually Priscilla Tirado, who’d broken both her arms and had lost her husband and baby in the crash, simply could not hold on any more and began to go under.  In a breathtaking feat of heroism, Lenny Skutnik, one of the bystanders on the bridge, stripped to his shirtsleeves and bare feet and dove in to help her.

To this day, if you asked a DC-er who was around in 1982 who Lenny Skutnik is, they will remember.  A month after Flight 90, the Washington Post published its annual Valentine's Day personals, and one anonymous admirer captured the gratitude of a region, saying simply WE LOVE YOU LENNY SKUTNIK.  But Skutnik was only the most famous--the day had several other heroes.  Roger Olian, who jumped in merely to give comfort to the survivors, even though he believed the situation was hopeless.  Arland Williams who survived the initial impact and passed the rope to several other passengers until he slipped under the waters. That section of the 14th Street Bridge is now named after him.

Flight 90 happened 30 years ago, when the airline industry was very different from what it is today.  In the early '80s airline travel, in the midst of de-regulation, was nonetheless comparatively glamorous and exotic.  My father and his cohorts were widely admired.  And gradually the glamor eroded--as customers compared bargains, precipitating a race to the bottom, the legacy carriers, with infinitesimally small profit margins, eliminated more and more perks.   Airlines are considered by some today little better than buses in the sky, the highly-trained pilots and crew dismissed as mere functionaries.

And then, a few years ago, another airline disaster nearly happened, and the parallels were striking.  A southbound flight, crippled just after takeoff.  A river in a major metropolitan area.  Mid-January.  But Captain Sullenberger and his crew rewrote the narrative and gave us the Miracle on the Hudson.  Instead of 78 killed, every single passenger and crew member was saved, with scant injury.*

To put this in perspective, this was the most successful ditching of a commercial liner EVER--all previous commercial ditchings incurred fatalities.  The margin of error is so much less forgiving with commercial jets--they are more unwieldy and more difficult to maneuver, the wings are longer, the number of possible casualties much higher.  But Sully never blinked--cool and calm he told his passengers to "brace for impact"** and guided his wounded craft onto the freezing water.

He and his crew made me proud, so proud, to have a father who's an airline pilot.

*Admittedly faced with a very different kind of challenge.  Pilots [i.e., military ones] are trained for ditchings, whereas Captain Wheaton and First Officer Pettit, the Air Florida pilots, never had a chance, as the plane never even really lifted off.


**Sully seems to have a gift for pithiness--I love his reply to the air traffic controller's suggestion that he turn around and land at LaGuardia.  One word: "Unable."  

The Paris of Appalachia

So for Thanksgiving I had the pleasure of visiting…Pittsburgh! Gateway to the West, the City of Bridges, home of:

• the mighty Steelers,
• Carnegie Mellon University [my actress grandmother’s alma mater],
• a thriving arts scene including the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Pittsburgh Opera,
• and the dearly departed Three Rivers Stadium, named for the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, whose confluence forms the heart of this sturdy, scrappy city. 

Pittsburgh [like New York City] developed as a port city, albeit an inland one, with a thriving business in trade, exploiting its strategic position between the East and the Midwest, amplified by its access to the Great Lakes. In fact one of Pittsburgh’s sobriquets is Gateway to the West. Another one is Iron City—and the city’s other main (historical*) industry is manufacturing. Iron, steel, glass—all drawing from western Pennsylvania's vast natural reserves of coal, lumber, petroleum…

Which perhaps is what drew the attention of the man who created one of the Pittsburgh area’s best-known treasures, the breathtaking Fallingwater, designed by the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

[I have long had a fascination with FLW’s works—my great-aunt and –uncle lived in one of his Usonian houses in Pleasantville, and my mother told me they were always tripping over architecture students crouched in the bushes, scribbling notes. When I read The Fountainhead I suspected Howard Roark was based on FLW and apparently I’m not the only one! Typically perversely, both Rand and Wright denied it but girlfriend, please. Roark even designs a GAS STATION.]

Apparently the original design called for the "udder-like" pumps
to descend from the ceiling "like mother's milk." Gee, that DOES sound exciting! Or something.

ANYWAY. One of Wright’s guiding design principles was integration, and so he conceived Fallingwater’s interiors as well as her structure, using building materials from the same natural reserves from which Pittsburgh** industry drew.  The same lumber sources, the same copper mines and stones...Wright's magnum opus could have been erected nowhere else but in this particular corner of the world, western Pennsylvania.

Notice how the perspective compels you to look
 through the windows, to the outside.

To walk through Fallingwater’s cantilevered terraces and stone-laid floors is to be immersed in the sounds and smells and feel of the Allegheny Mountains, to be a footfall away from the rushing of the Bear Run. A veritable organic cathedral, the perfect marriage of form and function, created by a modern Daedalus!

*The steel industry is but a shadow of what it was--it went belly-up in the '70s and early '80s, hence the term Rust Belt.

**One of the days I will have to write about Chicago—you gotta admire a city so can-do that the city civil engineers actually REVERSED THE FLOW OF THE RIVER.  Now that is some Midwestern pioneer spirit!

1963, 1970, 2011

Remind you of anything?
































What about this?

Or this?

Notice the Guardsman on the right of the picture (circled),
taking dead aim at the photographer, Ruffner--who was in fact a student.

Nothing galvanizes a movement like excessive force.  The children who demonstrated in Birmingham and the children who marched on the hills of Kent State were ultimately victorious--the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed, de jure segregation was overturned, and support for the war had finally eroded, due in large part to those anti-war students, just a few years after the Ohio State Guard wheeled around as one and fired on a bunch of unarmed students.

Just a reminder...

The Lambeth Goosestep

I’ve been busy lately digitizing my (huge) collection of musical theater cassette tapes. One that I came across this week was the mid-‘80s hit Me and My Girl, a fluffy tap-tastic import from across the pond. Me and My Girl has the most perfunctory of plots, about a young Cockney man who suddenly discovers that he is the Long-Lost Heir to the earldom of Hareford--but only if the executors of the will decide he is “suitable.” Gender-reversed My Fair Lady hijinks ensue!

If you can get past the enormous suspension of disbelief required by the audience (such hereditary peerages as dukedoms and earldoms are or at least were, things have changed a bit in the last several generations protected by entailment and certainly not subject to conditional snobbery tests--the barons of Runnymeade would rise up from their graves before they allowed THAT to happen!):

King John: Can I just add a quick rider about how the heir has to speak RP--

Looming Knight: NO. Sign it already, Softsword.

King John: But it would make such a great musical!

...Me and My Girl is a delightful bit of puffery, one long silly music hall number after another, dotted in between with comfortably predictable jokes.


HEATHERSETT: Aperitif, sir?
BILL: No thanks, I got me own.

DOWAGER: Do you know my daughter, May?
BILL: No, but thanks for the tip!

And certainly its most engaging and famous number is the first act finale, “The Lambeth Walk*,” one long rollicking set piece designed to take the piss out of British aristocracy.

We play a different way
Not like you but a bit more gay,
And when we have a bit of fun--oh boy!

Any time you're Lambeth way
Any evening, any day
You'll find us all
Doin' the Lambeth Walk--oi!

Robert Lindsay, Tony Award winner, singing The Lambeth Walk

As silly as it is, the number is truly infectious and was a HUGE hit in pre-War England--obviously a welcome distraction as Europe drew closer and closer to near-annihilation. As the saying went:

While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances — to The Lambeth Walk.

Even King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (mother and father of the current Queen) came to see the show in 1939, and sang along with the rest of the audience.** Within a few years, of course, the Kingdom had need of even more distraction--and here their affection for The Lambeth Walk brought its own rewards.

During times of challenge humor is an invaluable coping mechanism--it contextualizes, it cuts down, it reduces, it adds perspective. Monsters have frequently been cut down to size through humor--in fact this is the stratagem behind the riddikukus curse in Harry Potter, that you conquer your boggart by placing it in a silly context. In this age of irony we like to think we invented this technique, that the generations before us were all terribly earnest and brave and stalwart. Brave and stalwart the Greatest Generation certainly was--but no one can cut you down with humor like the Brits! During World War II some filmmaking genius had the clever idea to match an orchestra track of The Lambeth Walk to some footage from Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will--and thus, the mashup was born.

If this is not the funniest thing you've seen all week, there is something wrong with you.

They say that Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, flipped. out. when he saw this footage, throwing chairs across the room. God, I love British humor.

And oh, what a right little island.

A right little, tight little island...

*The actual Lambeth Walk is in the South End of London, off of Lambeth Road. The reference is to the strutting evening promenade popular amongst residents--Noel Gay had the idea to set it to song and thus an iconic song was born.

Notice Mayfair across the river, to the northwest--Mayfair is where the aristocracy, and thus new Earl's "posh" relatives, lived.

**Adorably--and cheekily--Lupino Lane, the star of the show, reported afterward, "They [Their Majesties] said they had been walking the Lambeth Walk the wrong way--the ballroom way--and promised to do it our way in the future."