Operation Playmate:
On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died.
From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry:
Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues
“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens
to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips
yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer,
of rounder replies?”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
“Hurrahing in Harvest”
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“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”
From my March 31, 2003, entry:
“During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their ‘Operation Playmate’ project….
Now, in light of the war in Iraq, ‘Operation Playmate’ has returned.”
Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003:
Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie “Mattress Dancing” Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction.
Etymology: Latin Terpsichor
,
from Greek Terpsikhor
from feminine of terpsikhoros,
dance-loving : terpein, to delight
+ khoros, dance.
See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City.
All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:
“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”
It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today’s date in another guise. To paraphrase an Eliot line,
“Hurry up please, it’s 5/13.”