Trooper York said...
I paid for it out of my own pocket as people who get married should do.
Weddings are very important in the Italian American culture. It is the one time you put your differences aside and celebrate as a family.
Unlike the Irish who do that for funerals.
My parents had that vinyl LP which is as old as me (1960); it's called Louis Prima Digs Keely Smith. One of the songs, Zooma Zooma Baccala, amused me and my brother to no end growing up, but we had no clue what the song was really about. It's really the same song in the wedding scene from The Godfather:
The original lyrics aren't even in Italian; they're in a Sicilian (or Neopolitan) dialect. The wonders of the Internets led me to track down the meaning of the words to the Louis Prima song one night. I was very amused by what I found. I converted my inherited vinyl to digital and translated the lyrics in the first YouTube link.
The mezzogiorno polka song tells about a young woman choosing a man to be her husband. She is confused and asks her mother to decide. Her mother describes each man and his "job," giving her the same comical answer for each one, indicating for instance, that if you marry the butcher, he will "sausage" you; if you marry the carpenter, he will "hammer" you; if you marry the farmer, he will "plough" you.
Obviously, the song is one big double entendre. Here's the best translation that I found: link
In many ways, the 1960's and earlier times were not more innocent times--people just had better imaginations.
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*Originally posted as "Those Horny Italians" here
21 comments:
Troop takes sartorial cues from Louis Prima.
Of corse I do. Louie Prims is my idol.
Bacala is an euphemism for the vagina.
Princepally because of the smell.
I always liked the sound engineering on that Louis Prima recording. It's like they dropped a single overhead microphone into the roomful of musicians. The background singers sound like they're across the room.
But it must have been a gas to work with Prima. I even like that work he did in "Jungle Book" for Disney.
Louie never showed up in the great flick, Big Night.
I always love the Old Italian gangster in GD II, running around asking everyone where's the REAL Italian food and why are all the WASP's here? Later he tries to warn Michael about doing business with Jews like Hyman Roth but to no avail.
Michael Gazzo should have played the Godfather. Fuck Brando.
Prima and Phil Harris were fantastic in the Jungle Book. I'll take that any day over those fake opretta aka lame Broadway Tunes of "Frozen".
But it must have been a gas to work with Prima.
Of course, if you listen to the anglicized lyrics in the video I posted, the song is more about what kept Ernest Borgnine alive so long than actually pumping ethyl.
That Old Black Magic!
That party sure looks like a lot of fun.
One time I went to a similar thing much lower scale. A woman at work bought a small house and moved into it. The move involved her entire extended family, a considerable number who had her moved in fifteen minutes. The rest of the day celebration. Being all young and all married they all had at least one child and they were all playing at once in the yard. I sat at a table with women and suddenly one would pop up to attention then sit down. Like popcorn these women. Within the din of children noise and squabble each woman can hear her own child with reliable audio fidelity. They knew instantly when their child was hurt, a little hurt, somewhat hurt, get over it hurt, or come here and let me look at you hurt, and I realized then the tremendous energy that goes into keeping up with small children. I didn't have it. These women did. You must be nearly a child yourself, just above that to raise children effectively with full energy. I looked upward in silent wonder that Nature really did know what it was doing by designing the reproduction system this way. Brilliant! To have near children raising children as they're so close to the experience themselves. Later and all that and the energy for it is forfeited.
My own brother defies all this. His children came later and he DOES have the energy for them. And it DOES take a lot, and he loves every minute of it.
Keely Smith had more sex appeal in her little finger than all the pneumatic blondes of that era.
My Polish grandmother said there was an old description about the stages of life: throw the water, throw the rice, throw the dirt.
@deborah: Those are the three sacraments. She didn't leave anything out.
Chick, don't know that a funeral is a sacrament, but that's the general drift.
I think there are about seven sacraments.
What are the others? I was just thinking of the three or so times when a clergyman officiates an event in a person's life -- in the old days of course.
http://www.americancatholic.org/features/special/default.aspx?id=29
What about last rites?
That's covered under anointing of the sick.
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