My Favorite Things

The first time I built my joy profile, I was on an airplane.

I was dealing with the grief associated with divorce, and I was really trying to think about, you know, okay, what are my favorite things? What is left after this, you know, seismic shift in my life? And so I just started free writing, and it was, I love ginkgo trees, and I love long walks, and I love long phone calls with my friends.

There is nothing I love more than cooking for an army of people.

I...

The more the merrier around my dinner table.

And I just started listing all of these things, and what happened was really fascinating because once I saw a ginkgo tree after I was aware that that was something on my joy profile, it held-- it had this compounding effect, where suddenly I thought, "Oh, there it is.

That's one of my favorite things." And it was like a, oh, almost like a check mark.

Like, what a great day.

And there was one thing that was in my head about, like, a repetition, but it's not really repetition.

If you think about the ways in which John Coltrane and Miles Davis did My Favorite Things.

[singing] Okay.

That, so, so here we hear a complete disruption of the sound of music.

Um, and I feel just really, really lucky.

And, um, and also it kinda runs down this list of, um, sort of in, in, uh, you know, in, um- The Sound of Music, uh, they, there's that song, These Are A Few of My Favorite Things, and she kinda lists off all these like whimsical and wonderful things.

Mm-hmm.

And that's kinda how I went about writing this song, where it was just little jewels of life that I am really attached to and really treasure.

he, [laughs] he had this big pulpit.

Like, he got this old church pulpit or something, and he stuck it in the middle of the room, and he'd put a blank piece of paper on that, and he'd walk around it and walk around it and walk around it, listening to this melody coming from Oscar, and that's a, you know, he'd find those incredible words.

I mean, think of writing a song like My Favorite Things, right?

That's amazing.

Missing too are the declamatory love ballads People Will Say We're in Love, No Other Love, and Younger Than Springtime.

Lesson songs like My Favorite Things, Getting to Know You, and I Whistle a Happy Tune are excluded, and when Some Enchanted Evening, that most formal of Rodgers and Hammerstein ballads, rings down the first act, it is performed in a light, breezy arrangement for five intertwining voices.

Originally a cabaret show at Rainbow and Stars, A Grand Night for Singing has been expanded into a smooth two-hour entertainment in which five singers run through three dozen Rodgers and Hammerstein songs.

Four of the revue's original performers, Victoria Clark, Jason Gray, Martin Vidnovic, and Lynn Wintersteller, have returned for the Broadway production.

It's always a bummer when a Best Musical nominee has to resort to a clip package.

All in all, I found this performance to be boring.

My big realization is that It's a Grand Night for Singing, the song, shares DNA with My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music.

I simply remember my favorite things and then I don't feel so bad.

He took another tune that nobody would have thought of as jazz and turned it into something that is now considered a jazz standard.

From The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein's My Favorite Things.

I'm not going to play the Coltrane version, but one of the many versions that was inspired by Coltrane, who gave artists permission to do what they wanted with that tune.

Not that the great Betty Carter needed such permission.

These

are my

few of my favorite things.

Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudel.