Well, dear readers, I know I have on many occasions promised a story and I think it’s high time we had one, don’t you? Not low time, mind you, no, I think it’s high time we had a story at haineshisway.com and what better story than the story of Hinky Meltz and Ernest Ernest. The Unvarnished Truth. Yes, you heard it here, dear readers, we will have the unvarnished truth about Meltz and Ernest, because we don’t tell the varnished truth around here. Varnish smells to high hell and we never use it. “High hell”? Shouldn’t that be “low hell”? How can something smell to high hell when hell is low? Some saying person has made an awful mistake. Something can stink to high heaven, yes, but not to high hell because hell is subterannean. Where was I? Something about varnish and smelly things and Meltz and Ernest. Was I talking about Kasha Varnishkas? Oh, yes, I remember. I remember sky. It was blue as ink, you know. In any case, I think it’s high time we tell the story of Hinky Meltz and Ernest Ernest, the songwriters du jour here at haineshisway.com. High time, high hell, what’s with all these high things? High School, high horse, high ho, I think we are giving low things short shrift, whatever the high hell that is. Of course, we can’t give low things tall shrift because low things cannot have tall shrift, only short shrift because short and low are a team, like Meltz and Ernest. Anyway, today we will start the story of Meltz and Ernest, but it will be a short story because not much is known about their lives. I’ve done lots of research and let me tell you it has not turned up a lot of pertinent facts. However, the facts that my research has turned up are unvarnished.
I thought that paragraph would never end, didn’t you? I thought that paragraph would keep on going come hell or high water. There’s that high again. High hell, high water, high holiday, enough with the high already. We had a lovely rehearsal yesterday with David Naughton, David Ruprecht, Joan Ryan and our very own Tammy Minoff for the Tourette’s Benefit concert. They’re doing a brace of songs from Julius and Cissy Wechter’s musical comedy, Growing Pains. I must say the songs, once heard, are hard to get out of your head – they’re very catchy.
All your posts yesterday about “worst meals” were most excellent and nauseating at the same time. If anyone missed them, simply use the handy-dandy Unseemly Archive Button. But for now, let’s all use the handy-dandy Unseemly Button button below so we can have the Meltz and Ernest story.
THE MELTZ AND ERNEST STORY: THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH
Before Hinky Meltz and Ernest Ernest met, they led separate lives, one not aware of the other. Hinky Meltz was born on the lower east side of New York in the early 1930s. His parents, Edward and Minky Meltz were loving and doting parents to Hinky and his four brothers, Binky, Pinky, Tinky and Winky. While Pinky, Tinky and Winky were always off playing sports, Hinky was at the piano, pounding away. He never took lessons, he was just a natural born pianist and by the time he was six he could play the Warsaw Concerto, which was suitably amazing since a) it was a very difficult piece and, b) it hadn’t been written yet. Hinky wrote his first song at age eight. It was a very personal song (he wrote his own lyrics, too) called “Ma, My Shoes Are So Tight My Feet Are Turning Green”. Only a fragment of this song survives:
Ma, my shoes are so tight my feet are turning green and they don’t feel great
So, ma can you buy me new shoes before they have to amputate?
While he was obviously not a great lyricist, the tune was undeniably clever with its rising fifths and diminshed sevenths. Hinky was a model student – but at ten he decided he didn’t want to be a model, that he wanted to be a full-time composer. This was a disappointment to Minky Meltz, but she allowed her son to have his dream.
Ernest Ernest was born in Lebanon, Ohio, but his parents quickly moved to the upper west side of New York, where they lived on 96th Street and Columbus Avenue in a very nice apartment. His parents, Moe and Teenie Ernest were stern and cold to their son. He was, in fact, basically raised by the family maid, Ilsa Francoise Rodriguez, a lovely lady of German, French and Hispanic parentage. Ilsa, who had a disconcerting melange of accents, was good to Ernest, and encouraged his obvious talent with words, by saying things like, “You vill write, mon ami, otherwise I will make you eat Frijoles.” From an early age, Ernest began his jottings (as he called them), keeping a diary, jotting down whatever thoughts came into his head, sometimes as prose but more often as poetry. Ernest’s jottings were very ernest, and profound even for someone of the age of five. One entry to his jottings diary reads thusly:
My mother is cold
My father is male
If you’d like to buy them
I think they’re for sale.
Yes, it was obvious that Ernest Ernest would someday grow into a fine lyricist.
And so, Hinky Meltz continued to pound away at the piano creating catchy tunes, and Ernest Ernest continued his jottings as they both grew to manhood. Soon the two would meet in a totally happenstance way that would change the course of both their lives.
Wow, that is a story. That is a tale. The saga will continue tomorrow in high fashion. There we go with the high again.
Don’t forget, tomorrow is also our Unseemly Trivia Contest and hopefully by then I will have thought of an Unseemly Trivia Contest question. Also, Donald will have a brand spanking new The Broadway Radio Show up on Sunday, and I’m sure he’ll be along to tell us what it is.
We always talk about musicals, songwriters or movies in our topics of discussion (and bad meals, too), but today let’s make our topic of discussion about words (in honor of Ernest Ernest), books. What are your favorite 20th century novels? I’ll start: I have always loved and adored and will always love and adore Miss Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird – I first read it back in 1961 and fell in love with it and that love affair has continued to this very day. I also love Lolita by Mr. Nabakov, Lord of the Flies by Mr. Golding, Nineteen Eighty-Four by Mr. Orwell, a wonderful book called Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons, Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window by Mr. Raymond Chandler, The Black Curtain and Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Mr. Cornell Woolrich (the latter title written under his pseudonym, George Hopley), The Chill by Mr. Ross Macdonald (one of the great detective books), Rosemary’s Baby by Mr. Ira Levin (a brilliant book and a brilliant film as well, the most faithful adaptation of any book to film), The Shining by Mr. Stephen King, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Miss Christie, The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess, Time and Again by Jack Finney (are you starting to feel that I love genre fiction?), The Collector by Mr. Fowles, Soldier In the Rain by William Goldman, The Last Flower by James Thurber (not a novel, of course, but brilliant nonetheless), well, I have to stop. Obviously these are not all masterpieces of literature, but they are all books I’ve loved and that have influenced me in one way or another. And, of course, there are way too many others to list. The most recent book I’ve read that I thought was disturbing and brilliant was by an English author called Martyn Bedford, a book called Acts of Revision. Your turn.