My White Knight

I've got my favorite musical, "Music Man" on the brain.

I love "The Music Man."  It was a staple in family films I watched as a kid.  Meredith Willson's 1957 classic Musical tells the story of Harold Hill, the scheming travelling salesman who swindles a small Iowa town into buying band uniforms and instruments for their children even though he himself knows nothing about music.

We've recently, as a family, watched the 1962 film.  I've seen it hundreds of times.  My kids loved it!  (Watch it if you haven't seen it, it's great!)  It was fantastic revisiting this beloved film again through more mature eyes.  There is so much depth to the story.  The music is top-notch, clever, fun, catchy and just good.  Oh, and Harold Hill was the first rapper in my opinion.

Aside from the music, Music Man is a great story.  Meredith Willson spent 15 years writing it and perfecting it and he nailed it.  It's about as perfect a production as you can get, with rich characters.  Marian Paroo, the female lead of the production, is a strong female character in a sea of weak doe-eyed female characters from the same era.

One of her ballads, "My White Knight" was playing in my head this morning.  In it, Marian sings of the kind of man she wants in her life.

"And if occasionally he'd ponder
What makes Shakespeare and Beethoven great,
Him I could love 'til I die.  Him I could love 'til I die."

This song is from the stage production, but was omitted from the film in lieu of "Being in Love," another nice song by Meredith Willson, that will certainly be revisited here someday if it happens to get stuck in my head.

Here's "My White Knight"