Trouble!

Trouble!
by Meredith Willson

Mass-steria!
Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground!
– “Professor” Harold Hill in The Music Man

That’s “Professor” with a capital “P” and that stands for “Pi”! Happy “Pi Day”, everybody! It’s another Fun-Time Friday and it’s also March 14 or “3.14”, if you will, so some smart folks call it “Pi Day”. Of course, I instantly thought too much about it, and wondered if we should celebrate officially at 3:37am (that is, at 0.15926535898 of the way through the day, beings as how Pi begins 3.1415926535898). And then, I thought that maybe we should have celebrated on March 4 at 6:56am (at 0.1415926535898 of the way through the third month). But then, there’s that whole base 10/base 12 problem . . . and fortunately at this point, Chester knocked a glass of water off the coffee table with his tail, thereby breaking my reverie. Lucky for you! So it really is true: one man's "trouble" is another's good fortune.

So let’s get moving with one of my all-time favorite musicals, Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. Mr Willson calls it his “Valentine” to his growing-up years in Mason City, Iowa. Set in the mythical “River City” in 1912, The Music Man tells the story of the transformative power of dreams and the triumph of love. Professional con man “Harold Hill” arrives in River City ready to sell them a bill of goods. He’s not sure which scheme to use until he meets his old friend Marcellus Washburn. Marcellus has fallen in love with a local girl and has settled down in River City. He tells Harold about a new Pool Hall about to open, and Harold now knows the “evil” for which he needs to offer the cure.

At a town meeting, Harold Hill (now calling himself a music “Professor”, offering band instruments, and selling “The Think System”) tells the crowd, “Either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community.” He thus begins one of the most famous “patter songs” of all time. And note to all Rap star wannabes: Pay attention. You might learn something.

Well, ya got trouble, my friend, right here,
I say, trouble right here in River City.
Why sure I'm a billiard player,
Certainly mighty proud, I say
I'm always mighty proud to say it.
I consider that the hours I spend
With a cue in my hand are golden.
Help you cultivate horse sense
And a cool head and a keen eye.
Y’ever take and try to give
An iron-clad leave to yourself
From a three-rail billiard shot?
But just as I say,
It takes judgment, brains, and maturity to score
In a balkline game,
I say that any boob can take
And shove a ball in a pocket.
And they call that sloth.
The first big step on the road
To the depths of deg-ra-day-
I say, first, medicinal wine from a teaspoon,
Then, beer from a bottle . . .

Sorry, to interrupt, but we needed to catch our breath. Not so for Robert Preston, who won the role of Harold Hill precisely because he wasn’t that good of a singer. When the other men trying out for the Broadway premiere in 1957 tried their hand at Trouble!, they had too much melodic sense (Trouble! had actually started out as dialogue and the producers thought that Harold needed to have a song at that point). Meredith Willson heard Mr Preston’s audition – where he seemingly effortlessly “talked” his way through the song – and instantly knew he had found Professor Harold Hill. And so had we all. Mr Preston took home the Tony Award that year for Best Actor in a Musical. The show won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Actress (for Barbara Cook). When Hollywood brought The Music Man to the silver screen in 1962, Morton DaCosta (the director of the Broadway production) also directed the film. He stayed very faithful to the original stage production and also brought Mr Preston and most of the cast with him, including Pert Kelton (Mrs Paroo) and the Buffalo Bills barbershop quartet. Two new additions were Shirley Jones as Marian Paroo and a new child actor, Ronnie Howard, as Marian’s brother, Winthrop. Studio head Jack Warner had wanted either Frank Sinatra or Cary Grant to play Harold Hill, but Mr Willson prevailed, thereby raising Hollywood’s awareness of Mr Preston and capturing his performance on film for all of us. And speaking of Warner and Sinatra, when we left off we were talking about “beer from a bottle”:

An’ the next thing ya know,
Your son is playin’ for money
In a pinch-back suit.
And list’nin’ to some big out-a-town Jasper
Hearin’ him tell about horse-race gamblin’.
Not a wholesome trottin’ race, no!
But a race where they sit down right on the horse!
Like to see some stuck-up jockey boy
Sittin’ on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil?
Well, I should say.
Now, friends, lemme tell you what I mean.
Ya got one, two, three, four, five, six pockets in a table.
Pockets that mark the diff’rence
Between a gentleman and a bum,
With a capital “B,”
And that rhymes with “P” and that stands for pool!

I saw Susan Stroman’s 2000 revival of The Music Man on Broadway. Lovely Rebecca Luker played Marian Paroo opposite Craig Bierko’s Harold Hill. For the curtain calls, Ms Stroman gave every member of the cast a trombone and dressed them in a marching band outfit. They all played Seventy-Six Trombones, with varying degrees of success. It was lot of fun! I also learned, when researching today’s song, that the Olds musical instrument company produced all the instruments for the film version of show. After filming, Olds refurbished the instruments and sold them to the public, without mentioning that they had been in the show. I think they frittered away a huge marketing opportunity: I know I would have paid extra to have one of those instruments. And speaking of “frittering”:

And all week long your River City
Youth'll be fritterin’ away,
I say your young men'll be fritterin’!
Fritterin’ away their noontime, suppertime, choretime too!
Get the ball in the pocket,
Never mind gittin' dandelions pulled
Or the screen door patched or the beefsteak pounded.
And never mind pumpin' any water
'Til your parents are caught with the cistern empty
On a Saturday night and that's trouble,
Oh, yes we got lots and lots a' trouble.
I'm thinkin' of the kids in the knickerbockers,
Shirt-tail young ones, peekin' in the poolhall
Window after school, look, folks! Trouble!
Right here in River City.
Trouble with a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool!

How times change. When I was a teenager, our church’s youth lounge had a pool table. I wonder what the good people of River City would have thought. And who knows if maybe they weren’t right. Sometimes, it’s hard to know where that slope becomes too slippery. That’s the funny thing about the point of no return: you don’t know you’re there until you’ve reached it. Rudolph Giuliani, when he was Mayor of New York, made it a policy that graffiti was to be cleaned off subway trains and broken windows repaired nightly. He believed that an atmosphere of vandalism and disrepair fostered more of the same. The book of Proverbs seems to agree: it includes this one proverb in two different places –

A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest –
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man.
– Proverbs 6:10-11 and also Proverbs 24:33-34

Harold Hill is certainly in agreement, as the crowd is now fully with him:

Now, I know all you folks are the right kinda parents.
I'm gonna be perfectly frank.
Would ya like to know what kinda conversation goes on
While they're loafin' around that Hall?
They'll be tryin' out Bevo, tryin' out Cubebs,
Tryin' out Tailor-Mades like a cigarette fiend!
And braggin' all about
How they're gonna cover up a tell-tale breath with Sen-Sen.
One fine night, they leave the pool hall,
Headin' for the dance at the Armory!
Libertine men and scarlet women,
And Ragtime! Shameless music
That'll grab your son and your daughter
With the arms of a jungle animal instinct!
Mass-steria!
Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground!

Of course, Harold has unknowingly put himself at odds with Mayor Shinn, the owner of the Pool Hall. Harold doesn’t help his case when he also unknowingly matches up the Mayor’s daughter Zaneeta with local “ruffian” Tommy Djilas, who he has enlisted to be the leader of the boys’ band. But 1912 proves to be a “summer of love” for River City, as lifelong adversaries on the School Board blend their four couldn’t-be-more-different voices into a Barbershop Quartet; as the nosy, pick-a-little-talk-a-little ladies of the town welcome the outcast librarian, Miss Marian, into their artistic endeavors; as shy, lisping Winthrop begins to verbalize his joy at receiving a trumpet to play in the band; as the townspeople begin to lose some of their “Iowa stubbornness” and part with hard earned money for the band instruments.

Marian isn’t at first convinced of the Professor’s good intentions, and by the next verse of Trouble!, she and the Mayor are the only two people in the meeting not under the Professor’s spell, as everyone else sings:

Trouble, oh we got trouble,
Right here in River City!
With a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P"
And that stands for Pool,
That stands for pool.
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in River City,
Right here!
Gotta figure out a way
To keep the young ones moral after school!
Our children’s children gonna have
Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble . . .

As the townspeople keep the chant of “Trouble” going, Harold exhorts them further:

Mothers of River City!
Heed the warning before it's too late!
Watch for the tell-tale signs of corruption!
The moment your son leaves the house, does he rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knee?
Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?
A dime novel hidden in the corn crib?
Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?
Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like “swell?”
And “so's your old man?”
Well, if so my friends . . .

And then everyone (minus the Mayor and Marian) joins in:

Ya got trouble,
Right here in River city!
With a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P"
And that stands for Pool.
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in River City!
Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock and the Golden Rule!
Oh, we've got trouble.
We're in terrible, terrible trouble.
That game with the fifteen numbered balls is a devil's tool!
Oh yes we got trouble, trouble, trouble!
We got trouble, here, we got big, big trouble!
With a "T"! Gotta rhyme it with "P"!
And that stands for Pool!

It’s all great fun. Of course, in the real world, it’s not always that simple. As George Carlin explains relativity, “Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot. Everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” Where do we draw the line? We’re given this warning, and accompanying bit of guidance, in 1 Peter 5:8-9 –

Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your fellow believers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.

And immediately before, in verse 7, St Peter offers these words of encouragement:

Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.

In Marian Paroo’s case, true love carries the day. The flames of love are fanned when she sees Winthrop’s transformation upon receiving his trumpet off the Wells Fargo Wagon. When the townspeople turn against Harold after a jealous anvil salesman (and competitor of Harold's) tells them the real story, Marian emphatically reminds them of how their lives have been transformed by the dreams that Harold has sparked in them. Of course, the transformation isn’t fully realized until the “band” marches in under the director of Tommy Djilas. They are outfitted in their uniforms and holding their instruments. Marian – believing more in Harold than he does in himself – breaks off a classroom pointer and gives it to him as a conductor's baton. He summons up all the courage he has to tell the band, “Now, think, men. Think!” Some say love is blind. In this case, it is tone deaf. The band begins honking out the Minuet in G . . . and it is the most beautiful thing their parents have ever heard!

I have heard this phrase before and I think it is lovely: Harold experiences “unanticipated redemption.” And as we prepare for Easter next week, aren’t we all singing the same tune?