"I'm in the Romance Business..."

Well, duh.

Except the quote isn't from me or any of the usual suspects.

It's from the brilliant 20th century American pop composer and lyricist Frank Loesser, who wrote Guys and Dolls, which lots of people (including maybe me) think is the most perfect Broadway musical ever, and whose music and lyrics have taken permanent residence in my romantic imagination, and whom I'm sure is partly to be thanked or blamed for getting me into the business as well.

Tuesday was the hundredth anniversary of Loesser's birth, and the excellent folks at NPR did a lovely job commemorating it. I got my title quote from Fresh Air's Terry Gross's conversation with singer/pianist Michael Feinstein about Loesser's life and work (listen to it here and also check out the written info and links). And when Gross asked Feinstein to sing a Loesser song to close the interview, and he chose perhaps most the swooningly romantic one of all of them, "I've Never Been in Love Before" -- he introduced it with that line of Loesser's.

Unaccountably, Feinstein's performance isn't completely on the otherwise terrific Fresh Air link. But here's the great jazz musician Chet Baker doing it. I couldn't find a way to cut and paste the lyrics, which perhaps means I shouldn't, legally -- but you can read them here. As Feinstein says, they're simple. Gorgeously simple, a perfect capsule romance moment: the smart, witty, hitherto self-possessed lover (I thought my heart was safe/I thought I knew the score) newly and utterly humbled and transformed in the instant of emergent passion.

I'm listening to it right now via mp3, but I'm hearing it with the ears of my eleven-year-old self on the living room floor in front of on my parents' state-of-the-art stereo in its Danish Modern cabinet. An eleven-year-old who, needless to say, hardly "knew the score" (I didn't know anything except perhaps my own desperate desire to be that wonderfully wise and worldweary and yet that newly innocent. Mixing memory and desire again: no wonder I've always found "time-travel romance" a redundant concept).

Moving the phonograph needle back and forth over certain favorite tracks, the eleven-year-old wore down the vinyl of the 1950 RCA-Victor original cast recording as she soaked in a little romance-writer craft.

But this is wine
That's all too strange and strong
I'm full of foolish song
And out my song must pour

Since then, I've heard romance writers advise that metaphor is a good way to "heighten" emotional effect.

True enough, but there's more to say here.

Metaphor is language charged with energy. The effort to travel from point A to point B in the mind -- to make the link, let's say, between falling in love and getting tipsy -- finds its home in the words the mind finds itself shaping. Not because the lover intended to hype up the language at that moment, but because the work of making the connection, like an electrical current, took charge of the language -- transforming it as it flowed through it, and shocking everyone, most of all the astonished speaker/singer/lover.

"Physics for dummies," I call this sort of thing nowadays when I give erotic writing workshops: Because the best metaphors (or perhaps all of them) are instances of language involuntarily leaping out from somewhere not quite perceptible -- the capillaries, the forces binding the atoms of feeling and speech. In ecstasy (from the Greek for displacement).

The strange, strong wine of "I've Never Been in Love Before" would have been quite enough for one besotted pre-adolescent. But in happy fact it doesn't come by itself. It's the third element of a triptych of songs sung by the play's wonderfully, classically mismatched pair of lovers (straitlaced Salvation Army missionary Sarah Brown, and suavest of Broadway lowlife gamblers, Sky Masterson):

The first song, "If I Were a Bell," is comic, happy, ditzy. Ask me how do I feel, demands a slightly tipsy Sarah, emerging from her cocoon of pious rectitude to answer the question itself -- again and again, from simile to exuberant (if still conditional) simile: if she were a bell, a gate, even a salad splashing her dressing. Not quite ecstatically metaphoric yet, but wonderful nonetheless -- check out Doris Day doing it (from before -- as the wit Oscar Levant put it -- she was a virgin). And read the lyrics here.

The second (and my lifetime favorite) is "My Time of Day," Sky introducing Sarah to Broadway at four AM, "a couple of deals before dawn." This one (since I know it by heart), I will type out in its short, spectacular entirety, for anyone who loves big cities, rain-washed pavement, the intimacy of empty streets, the miracle of shared solitude.

My time of day is the dark time a couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop and the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone

When the smell of the rain washed pavement
Comes up clean, and fresh, and cold
And the street lamp light fills the gutter with gold

That's my time of day, my time of day
And you're the only doll I've ever wanted to share it with me

Here's Peter Gallagher doing it, from a "making of" TV show about the 1992 Guys and Dolls revival and album.

In the play, as in the Gallagher clip, the song ends by Sky bursting out, "Obediah. Obediah Masterson, that's my real name." To which he adds, wonderingly, "You're the first person I ever told it to."

I've always loved the moment when you're finally able to share a secret, as well as give a name to a passion. And though at first I thought that the scene in my Almost a Gentleman -- after David learns Phoebe's real name, and wanders (ecstatic, transported) through foggy, gaslit London streets -- was inspired by "Maria" from West Side Story, it seems clear enough now that "My Time of Day" had quite as much to do with it.

Perhaps because it's about sharing a secret, for many years I thought this song was my special secret. But as I learned (also from NPR), "My Time of Day" was Loesser's favorite too. (And I notice today, for the first time, that the smell of rain-washed pavement made it into my novella, "A House East of Regent Street" as well.)

How about you?

Do you cherish a secret passion for musicals? (Or not so secret, maybe, since the advent of Glee-- not to speak of that great moment in TV history, Buffy: The Musical.)

Which are your favorites? (Because although I coyly asserted that Guys and Dolls might possibly be the most perfect Broadway musical, I wouldn't feel right without a mention of West Side Story or Carousel)

And did you know that Frank Loesser, who wrote some 700 songs, wrote at least two that I half unconsciously believed had simply always existed in nature -- "Heart and Soul" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside," (performed deliciously by Loesser and his first wife Lynn here and transcendantly by Ray Charles and Betty Carter here). Any other Loesser favorites?

And do you feel the same deep connection between song, metaphor, and romance that I do?