Loading...
The Citizen, 1992-06-24, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24,1992. PAGE 5. Arthur Black Girl from Impanema sounds like a lousy date If it's not too personal, I'd like to take up my allotted half page today by telling you about a couple of women in my life. Suzanne and Heloisa their names are - one's French Canadian, the other Brazilian. They both fluttered into my life more than 30 years ago. I've been haunted by them ever since. I thought about them, dreamt about them, fantasized and even hummed songs about them off and on for the past three decades. But I never laid eyes on either of them until last week. The French Canadian one is Suzanne Verdal. There was a photo of her in the paper last Wednesday. It showed her packing her belongings into the back of a Chevy four-by-four. She's leaving Montreal and heading for California. By weird coincidence, the same newspaper carried a photo of Heloisa three days later. She's as tall and statuesque as I'd imagined, but with long platinum hair curling over her shoulders. Funny. I'd always pictured her with International Scene By Raymond Canon Update on national anthems There is something about national anthems that moves me; it is probably not that the words are so moving since I would hazard a guess that not many people pay attention to them. Perhaps it is the event to which the anthem is attached but, whatever the cause, people can relate to the emotion of, say, O Canada, more than many another song. Perhaps they would not if they had to pay attention only to the words. I will come back to our anthem in a minute but my travels over the past few years have brought me to the realization that some anthems are in need of a change. For openers there is La Marseillaise of France which gets a bit racist when it states that it doesn't want any impure (i.e. foreign) blood staining its soil. Given that there are now a great many citizens of that country who have as their birthplace a land far away from France, how do they feel when they get around to the offending line? Probably not very patriotic! There has been a considerable amount of agitation to change the words but so far the government has not seen fit to take any action. chestnut-coloured hair. But then I'd never even known her name was Heloisa until I saw her picture in the paper. To me she was simply The Girl From Ipanema. Anyone under the age of 35 who's still reading this might as well move right along to the Classified Ads section now. I realize that The Girl From Ipanema probably means nothing to you. Or perhaps I'm wrong. The song was on the hit parade for ages. Even today once in a while, pushing my carl around the supermarket aisles. I will hear those familiar lyrics tall and tan and young and lovely the girl from Ipanema goes walking ... oozing out of the store speakers, wrapped in curdling strands of Muzak. It wasn't Muzak when it first hit the airwaves back in 1962. It was the National Anthem of a new kind of music called Bossa Nova and it swept the world. I, along with several hundred million other male earthlings, promptly fell head over heels in love with The Girl From Ipanema, a woman I had never seen. A woman who frankly, I didn't believe really existed. But I was mistaken. The Girl From Ipanema was a 16-year-old student in Rio de Janeiro whose name was Heloisa Eneida de Menezes Paes Pinto (no wonder he just called her ‘the girl’). And she really did walk to the beach past the besotted eyeballs of a music composer by the name of Tomas Jobim. Jobim saw her, felt his heart strings strum a major chord, sat down and wrote the famous song. I feel sorry for the Russians. For years Canadians have been listening to the anthem of the Soviet Union sung at hockey matches and Olympics but now that the Soviet Union is no more, the words no longer have any validity. Getting a new anthem is apparently not high on the list of any priorities of Boris Yeltsin but what do they do in the meantime? Maybe they should use the melody of Tshaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”; it was, after all, written by a Russian and it does celebrate a great Russian victory, something that has been a bit hard to come by of late, other than hockey matches, of course. The Germans have not recovered from having the first verse of their anthem forbidden by their first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. It is not hard to see why Mr. Adenauer took the stand he did; the anthem starts out “Germany, Germany over everything, everything in the world.” To him this smacked too much of the Nazi regime. The decision was taken while I was going to school in Germany and I can vouch for the fact that he pretty well reflected the feeling of the time. The third verse was permitted since it talks of unity, justice and freedom. The Germans now have their unity; this should make them sing the anthem with a bit more gusto. The Americans are a bit bellicose in their anthem but, if I have a quarrel with it, it is the melody and not the words. I would think that a good many patriotic Yanks can not even reach the high notes. This inability is matched only by their singing “O Canada” properly. What do they have against us anyway? It changed Jobim's life of course. A number one hit song will do that - but it changed Heloisa's life loo. She became The Girl for life. It became her whole persona. It turned her from a human being into a product. Today, The Girl From Ipanema runs her own publicity firm and modelling agency. She appears in Brazilian soap operas and does celebrity endorsements. A few years ago she even hosted a talk show on which she invited guests to join her for an interview in her hot tub. And the French Canadian heart-throb? Suzanne Verdal? You guessed it - she's the Suzanne made famous by Leonard Cohen in the song of the same name. Turns out Suzanne didn't really know Leonard Cohen that well. She feels he kind of used her. In fact, reading the newspaper story you get the feeling Suzanne thinks Canada kind of used her. After a court battle with Hydro­ Quebec over an unpaid electric bill for $5,000, Suzanne became disillusioned with life in the Great White North and applied for a U.S. visa. Suzanne thinks of herself as a serious dancer and a performance artist. “Sometimes,” she says, “I feel like this warrior goddess, strapping on the shield, getting ready to go out and fight ... for my children or my art.” Frankly, Suzanne sounds like she could be a flaming pain in the butt. And The Girl From Ipanema sounds like she’d be about as much fun on a date as my accountant. Of course, I'm not exactly the pompadoured, flat-bellied, swivel-hipped stud I was thirty years ago, either ... If there is one country whose anthem can be said to be unique, it is Poland. It was composed at a time when Poland did not even exist, which, if you know your history, came about when the land was divided up between Prussia, Austria and Russia. At any rate, a few Polish patriots, and there always seem to be quite a few of them, fled to Italy and it was there that they put together the anthem which is still used today. I should point out that, even when Poland existed, the borders have been anything but fixed. You may recall, if you are as ancient as I am, that in 1939 the Nazis marched in from the west, took 3/5th of the country while the Russians wasted no time in coming in from the east and taking the other 2/5 ths. For some Poles it must have been very much a case of deja vu. At least the Brazilians will no longer have to worry about committing the same gaffe they did a few years ago. There was a slate visit from West Germany and the band at the airport promptly played the East German anthem. Not many months after that, it was the turn of the East Germans to visit. Guess what! The band just as promptly played the West German anthem. When last heard from, the band had been given a one-way ticket up the Amazon. I should point out that Canada is one of the few countries which has totally different words for the two versions. For the record the anthem was composed by a French Canadian and the original words are in French. The English version is by no stretch of the imagination a translation. Even the Swiss, with their three versions, can't match that. The Short of it By Bonnie Gropp Making the most of our time Well, we have experienced already the longest day of the year. The first day of summer is here and past, not that you could notice, temperately speaking, and now the days get shorter. To be honest, that has never made a whole lot of sense to me; being the season we all anticipate, it seems a little ill- conceived that the days get shorter when it arrives, though I guess it's out of our hands. And if that isn't enough of a reminder to you of how quickly time passes, just think — the fall and winter catalogue has arrived! When I was a child summer seemed endless. The days lasted forever and those eight to 10 weeks of vacation represented an eternity. Many times since has my family indulged me by listening while I told them how full those hazy days of summer were for me as I visited my cousin on the farm, holidayed with my grandmother, stayed with family friends and beachcombed with my parents. They say that our perspective changes with the passage of time. That must certainly be the case, because once when I was boring my husband and kids with one of my strolls down memory lane, I actually remembered more holidays than I had lime for. To their amusement as I ticked off on my fingers a list of special summer places I had enjoyed as a child, I realized that 1 didn't have enough time in the summer months to have visited them all. Kind of sounds a lot like life today, actually. The only difference now is that there's just not enough time to do what you really want as everyone seems so busy doing things they think they must. Climbing in the car for the umpteenth time the other day to drive somewhere that I had no desire, nor time to go, I began thinking that life today has become a routine of clocks and calendars. When you aren't checking the date to see who has what on, and working out transportation arrangements to get them wherever, then you are looking at your watch to see how much time you have. Many times when circumstances hold me captive I will catch myself checking the time, thinking of what is yet to finish and panicking because I can not possibly do it all if I don't soon get away. So many people are in the same boat; our world spinning so quickly that it's hard to believe we will not soon be thrown off. Many is the time that the title of an old movie flashes cross my mind: "Stop the world I want to get off'. The irony is that getting off could be as simple as not getting on in the first place. Everyone today is so busy planning tomorrow's schedule that they have forgotten to pencil in the present. We are always thinking ahead, even when relaxing, so it seems we are unable to content ourselves with where we are at that moment. If we could all schedule an appointment for ourselves each day that would leave us with a lasting memory of that day time might slow for us. The other day I took pictures at a jamboree and though my tastes in music do not run that direction it brought back memories for me of a more uncluttered time in my life when in my summer childhoods I attended the outdoor family dances in the rural hamlet of Wallaceville. It demonstrated a carefree exuberance that we would do well to try and recapture. An interesting thought was injected into a movie I watched the other night; that we all have one thing in our life that will give life meaning, it's up to us to find it. It forgot to mention, however, that when we do find it, it's also up to us to be smart enough to make, and take, the time to appreciate it.