“Tea for Two,” the iconic song from the Broadway musical, No, No, Nanette, was published one hundred years ago on June 10, 1924. It was composed by Vincent Youmans with lyrics by Irving Caesar (see “Tea for Two“). In the duet, a young couple considers marriage. The man, Tom, wants to marry right away but his girlfriend, Nanette, would rather wait and have some fun first.
That fun takes place in Atlantic City, which in the 1920s must have been the place to be with its beaches, boardwalk, beauty pageants, illegal gambling, and bootlegging. It also had rides and attractions like horse diving on the Steel Pier. Young women in bathing suits would ride horses off a sixty-foot platform into a pool below to the astonishment of crowds. It must have been one of the most bizarre things to witness and terrifying for the animals. Nanette was not one of those divers, although she was popular enough to be called the “Peach on the Beach.”
I bring up the song, because its centenary coincides with the age of my house, which also turns one hundred. Admittedly, that might not be very old for a house. In San Jose, California there are plenty of houses a century old or older. Many of them reflect two, basic architectural styles: Prairie and Spanish adobe. In fact, you can find both styles throughout the Bay Area (see below).
Prairie-style homes have sweeping, horizontal lines and open spaces. This style reflects the modern concept of form following function. Spanish adobe is what you might expect with stucco walls, tiled roofs, arched doorways, ironwork, beams, and alotta terra cotta. Think of the California missions.
I live in a Spanish-style house that originally was constructed with others to accommodate workers at the Del Monte cannery at a nearby train station. Two of the most impressive things about it are its lathe walls and wooden floors. The walls are in fine condition. The floors need some cleaning and repair in the more heavily used areas such as in front of the gas stove. This, even after I treated them with linseed and olive oils. As for the stove, it is a chrome and porcelain beauty made by Wedgewood. Imagine baking meatloaf in a fifties-era Cadillac. Now, that’s exciting.
When I found out about the anniversary of the song a few weeks ago, I took to playing it on my desktop. I imagined what it was like for the original occupants listening to it on the radio or gramophone. Now, once again, the tune echoed through the house. The walls and floor must have rejoiced hearing the familiar song.
I like to think that I am drawn to the past in ways that are appreciative and respectful. That may be symptomatic of a firstborn child, which I am. There was even a time when I wore a bow tie and drove a 1962 Ford Thunderbird. I don’t do silly things like that anymore, and I’m not sure what point I was trying to make other than that back then, as now, I liked chrome. I have to say, though, that I am often shocked by the lack of historical knowledge among most people. I heard an “influencer” on social media the other day refer to the seventies as “the past,” which is technically true but hardly helpful. Five minutes ago are also “the past.” You can’t step into the same river twice.
There has been a similar decline in language. That could be from changes taking place in English as it evolves and, in particular, American English, which is complicated mainly because of its adaptability. Given Darwin’s theory of selection, that may mean English will be around for quite some time, which is a good thing. If you lose your history and language, you might as well turn out the lights on your way out. It doesn’t matter which architectural style your house was built in.
Of course, music is a great way to preserve both the past and language, but you have to know about music to preserve it. So, in that spirit here are various arrangements to choose from for “Tea for Two.” I suggest trying them all and even looking for more. I like them so much I may have to take tap dance lessons. It’s going to be a long summer.
Image credits: feature by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash; tea cakes by Ja San Miguel on Unsplash; all house images by David Sawyer CC-BY SA 2.0. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”
I think appreciation of the past intensifies as we get older and realize that the majority of our life is in the past. Certainly, this is true for me, and I expect the trend to increase if I get to be significantly older.
I’ve always been attracted to objects–buildings and other artifacts that are time travelers from previous eras that have surviving into the present. Many artifacts, but especially handmade valuable objects from the past, seem to have a psychometric aspect–infused with memory radiating a past zeitgeist.
Many younger people are impoverished by ignorance of history before the birth of Tik-Tok, etc. but older folks have often said this about the young. Something that is not commented on so much though, is how much our ability to “time travel” to the past has been steadily growing during our lives.
The growth in the technology of narrative writing–especially the novel–means that for us English majors at least, 19th Century London feels like a place we’ve traveled to due to the cinematic brilliance of Dicken’s novels, etc. And then we have photography, audio recording, movie and video recording. Every year those technologies extend our sensory reach into the past.
We could not do this when we were kids, but now we can listen to an original recording of a century-old song, and see the people of 1924 in sound and motion. We’ve crossed a historical event horizon where now, the world of a century ago is cinematically available to us. There are YouTube channels devoted to the oldest film records around. You can watch a Civil War veteran give a speech. And we’ve also never had so much archeological data about the distant past. So we should appreciate that anyone who wants a relationship to the past, can have a more detailed, vivid and sometimes even immersive experience of it than anyone of an earlier era.
Thanks for the comment and reflection, Jonathan. If you don’t know about Peter Jackson’s documentary of the British Army in WWI, check it out. It’s astonishing. https://www.dvdsreleasedates.com/movies/9343/they-shall-not-grow-old
Exactly, it is awesome, by digitally multiplying the 35 mm frames so that, in effect, time can be slowed down as compared to the way WW1 era silent films look when played at 17FPS, as if the people then were living in an ant-like time rhythm allows us to empathically enter the scene and see the pain, fear and horror in their eyes.
As a matter of fact, I am old enough to have seen the “diving horse“ at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier. I guess I was a teenager and wanted to see this thing in action.
I wouldn’t say that was a diving horse. It was more like a horse that had to stand on a platform with a woman on top of him. The platform was then dropped at one end, so it effectively became a sliding board and the damn horse – despite attempts to backpedal – had no choice but to slide off the platform and into the tank of water.
The whole thing was awful, in my opinion. That was long before PETA but it’s a good thing PETA came along and the horse retired to some (hopefully dry) pasture.
The article I linked in the post talks about the origins of horse diving, but the whole thing sounds not just ludicrous but pathetic. I wonder how the riders weren’t crushed to death. When we make playthings out of large, wild animals, bad things happen (e.g., orcas)…Thanks for the comment…BTW, you can talk about horse diving when invited to your grandson’s school to speak. Jes sayin…
Rob, I agree about the allure of a past that’s a bit more distant than the seventies. I can sing more songs from a century ago than from the last ten years. Another architectural style popular in San Jose and here in Santa Cruz is Craftsman: https://www.thespruce.com/craftsman-homes-5070211
Craftsman, right! Thanks, Ann. Great link.