HIGHLIGHTING THE NEWS TO MAKE AN IMPRESSION

When I sit down to read the local morning newspaper I usually have my yellow highlighting marker nearby. I run it through names, places and dates so as to indelibitize them on my mind.

But I also highlight things that please me very much, in fact, things that make me laugh aloud because I'm so much in agreement with the writer who has said it so well.

So it was when I picked up a recent paper and read an article describing the Grammy Awards. The song, "Unforgettable," was the big winner, a spliced-together song by Natalie Cole and her unforgettable father, deceased Nat King Cole. But it was what Irving Gordon, the original writer of the song, has to say that set my yellow marker to flying and my chuckler to start chuckling. He said, "It's nice to have a song come out that doesn't scream, yell or have a nervous breakdown while it talks about tenderness ... also it's nice to have a song accepted that you don't get a hernia when you sing it."

Didn't he say it just right? I've often wondered if the modern singers know just what their faces and body postures look like when they are singing pop, country, western, and, yes, avant-garde religious etc. To me, and I imagine to Irving Gordon, they look as if they're in extreme pain, manic depressive, or as if they just hate to come out with the words. One gets so fascinated or bewildered with their writhing contortions, the music, if it is to be called such, gets lost. The words, if they are really words (I can't make them out. A two syllable word might be stretched out to five) seem to be in a foreign language. This might be a good thing for me, for I understand the lyrics, when spelled out, are explicit and outrageous, especially with the hard rock and heavy metal and that would make me writhe and contort and hurt my back.

Why can't one just stand up and sing a song like Anne Murray, Perry Como, Nat Cole (did) or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Imagine all those Mormon Tabernacle choir singers bending double, squeezing their faces like they've eaten sour pickles or Mexican chilies. I think the pillars behind them would fall and the lights behind the pillars go out.

Our grade school music teacher, when she suspected someone was not enunciating clearly came to stand close beside the suspected one and listen. If "My liddle gray home in the West" was being said instead of "little gray home," she stopped the music and asked the culprit to spell "little" and then pronounce it several times. It had an efficacious effect.

In Mama's old family Bible there are a lot of clippings, cards, mementos of various kinds that someone wanted to save. Among these is a school report card given to my Aunt Minnie many years ago. One of the classes was elocution. Her grade was excellent. Any elocution classes around today? If so, I bet they wouldn't allow "like" and "you know" to creep into anyone's speech after every third or fourth word, or songs to be sung so that the listener couldn't make out a single word.

From time to time and here and there I've been hearing about the left-wing elite at some of our Ivy League institution expounding on the "wonders" of communism. This was hard for me to understand, especially since we so recently have joyously seen Marxism stumble and fall. I wondered who they could be. Perhaps I haven't been reading the right "think tank" pamphlets, or I would have known. But last week, again our local paper set my yellow highlighting marker to work. Columnist Walter Williams put his finger right on them Columbia University's Seweryn Bisler; Harvard's professor, John Kenneth Galbraith and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Paul Samuelson and Lester Thurow. I don't know that I can do anything about this, but at least now I know and I can hiss when I see any of them on TV and they will not be invited to my next tea party.

Well, so as not to be too negative, a few days ago I highlighted from a gentler item, "Jonquils and daffodils are already blooming along with some yellow forsythia bushes." I too wrote something like this in my daily journal and added that they were about the same shade as my yellow highlighter.

REJOICE!