{"id":13602,"date":"2013-05-15T13:25:10","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T17:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=13602"},"modified":"2025-03-07T11:31:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T16:31:20","slug":"story-up-my-sleeve-15-midweek-music-break-cell-block-tango-by-john-kander-and-fred-ebb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/story-up-my-sleeve-15-midweek-music-break-cell-block-tango-by-john-kander-and-fred-ebb\/","title":{"rendered":"Story Up My Sleeve #15 \/ Midweek Music Break: &#8220;Cell Block Tango,&#8221; by John Kander and Fred Ebb"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-size: 85%; line-height: 1.25em;\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"width: 40%; float: right;\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/girlshandknife.jpg?ssl=1\" alt=\"Girl's hand holding a knife, apparently not in food prep\" \/><em>[Continuing to combine the <\/em><a title=\"Story Up My Sleeve posts: the background\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/story-up-my-sleeve-the-background\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Story Up My Sleeve<\/a><em> and <\/em><a title=\"All posts in the Midweek Music Break category\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/category\/03_runningaftermyhat\/midweek-music-break\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Midweek Music Break<\/a><em> series for Wednesdays in May&#8230;]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Doing this\u00a0<em>Story Up My Sleeve<\/em> series has reminded me of a forgotten pleasure: the reading of short-story\u00a0<em>anthologies<\/em>. I&#8217;ve never been able to read, cover-to-cover, an entire anthology of stories by a single writer (although I came close with John Cheever); but I&#8217;ve read the entirety of many anthologies of stories by\u00a0<em>multiple<\/em> writers. I just haven&#8217;t done so in a long time.<\/p>\n<p>So when casting about for a song to feature today, I was delighted to suddenly think of this number, from the Kander &amp; Ebb musical\u00a0<em>Chicago<\/em>. The lyrics present an anthology of six short-short stories, each with a different first-person narrator; while the stories are spoken rather than sung, each has a certain built-in crescendo-to-climax as the &#8220;murderesses&#8221; take turns describing their <del>crimes<\/del> murders, and as each story is told the other women sing the background refrain: <em>He had it coming<\/em>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"intrinsic-container intrinsic-container-16x9\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JXBNFWNYekQ?si=X9KSf9m6ywu-mKdl\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p><em>[<a title=\"Lyrics: 'Cell Block Tango (He Had It Coming)'\">Lyrics<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>(Those lyrics are a little squirrely, so to speak. I began with lyrics commonly found around the Internet, but must&#8217;ve spent at least 45 minutes stopping the song, adjusting the lyrics, re-starting and backing up in the song to make sure I had it right so far, continuing, stopping again&#8230; (The lyrics I had obviously came from some production other than the film. Maybe they were the original lyrics as published, I don&#8217;t know. They sure didn&#8217;t fit flush with the lyrics as sung.) Finally I just said the hell with it and posted what I had to that point. :))<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Continuing to combine the Story Up My Sleeve and Midweek Music Break series for Wednesdays in May&#8230;] Doing this\u00a0Story Up My Sleeve series has reminded me of a forgotten pleasure: the reading of short-story\u00a0anthologies. I&#8217;ve never been able to read, cover-to-cover, an entire anthology of stories by a single writer (although I came close with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2252,3448,74],"tags":[3472,3473],"class_list":{"0":"post-13602","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-midweek-music-break","7":"category-story-up-my-sleeve","8":"category-music","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-kander-ebb","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-3xo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13602"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28047,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13602\/revisions\/28047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}