by Mark Morelli

Though we revere language, and maybe because we revere language, we have not always corrected our children when they misspeak. We think their malaprops are better than the originals.

For instance it seems much more delightful that this weekend we are going to the “theodore” as four-year-old Julia calls it, to see a community theater production of “Annie.”

To prepare for our trip to the theodore, we play the “Annie” CD. Daddy Warbucks sings, “N.Y.C.,“ a gentle tribute to the great city. One line is especially poignant these days: “No one other town has the Empire State and a mayor five-foot-two,” the latter an allusion to Fiorello LaGuardia (and also the subject of a musical that I’ve got on CD and is scheduled for when the kids turn 11 and 7.) But the reference to a tall building and a mayor of stature gave me pause so that I wasn’t paying attention to my eight-year-old daughter.

“Dad, I said, do you know what NYC stands for?“ She added: “New York City.“

“Yeah,“ I said.

This is the kid I took to see “Annie” on Broadway four years ago when we lived on the east coast. She believes me when I tell her about it, meaning, she doesn’t even remember going but I‘ve got the Playbills to prove it and I wouldn’t take back the 120 bucks for anything. At the time her eyes widened as she rode my shoulders through Times Square on our circuitous route to the Martin Beck Theater and then to Ray’s Pizza.

“I can’t wait to take you both back to New York,” I told the girls. “I can’t wait till you're old enough to take long walks through the city with me.”

“I don’t want to go to New York City,” said Julia. Four years before she had been born in Hackensack. From the maternity ward room window I could see the Manhattan skyline.

“Why?” I asked.

“Planes crash into buildings,” she said, making an explosion sound, not to be playful, but to punctuate the seriousness of her assertion. Just three weeks before the September 11 attacks we'd visited the Liberty Science Museum just across the river from the World Trade Center. From the observation deck I showed them the towers. I’d forgotten that we even snapped a picture of the buildings until we got back the developed film a few days after they crumpled.

I am proud that Julia retains current events. I am determined that she is able, even at her age, to put this horror into context.

She does.

She sees photographs of my father in uniform in World War II. She listened while he showed them his war memorabilia, including a Luger and a big Nazi flag. She knows my mother is the English-born wife of an American GI.

But still, they’re just kids. What am I going to do, make Stephen Ambrose their bedtime stories?

Instead, I sing to them and play recordings of the songs of the war years and ask them to imagine the people saying these words to each other:

Within seconds of hearing the reeds of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, my mind is completely filled with images and emotions and history of the young men and women of World War II, and by extension, the adults of my early childhood.

In the early 80s I read a Doonesbury strip in which a WWII vet engaged in a combative argument with a Vietnam vet. The WWII vet accused the younger man of “losing” his war. Back and forth they argued, till finally, the old GI capped the argument.

“Well,“ he said, “We had better music.”

It’s true, in the sense that pre-rock & roll American popular standards hold up without being silly. I actually flinched at the thought of attending the reunion of my high school class of 1979 for fear the dim but well-meaning deejay would play some of the opulent googah we'd rammed through our ears back then. Just play Styx’ “The Grand Illusion” for a representational condensation of the whole bulgy, big-haired, Bic-lit, precursor to “Cats” stage shows that was amplification, not artistry.

But that’s just my opinion. Be it far from me to discredit the tears anyone shed when radio stations played “My Sweet Lord,” “Something” or “Hear Comes The Sun” in the wake of George Harrison’s death. Just to remind both you and me that you’ve got to judge songs, like people, on their own merits, I’ll take “I really want to see you Lord but it takes so long my Lord,” over “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” any day.

It is a popular lunkheaded, but unimaginative sneer to think of musicals as an art form the furthest removed from reality. “Yeah, right,“ go the lunkhead detractors, “Like when do people in real life just break into song?“

Like every day, long before Edison put rhyme on wax, when work songs were chanted in fields and galleys, over embroidery hoops and looms, by villages sending warriors off to battle, by boys with lutes who sat in gardens beneath the windows of their beloved.

I now associate the songs from “Annie” with something much larger than a mere Broadway musical. They have become the songs of my living room. Not only in the years to come, but even now, these show tunes bring to my mind first a mental slideshow of my happy daughters playacting and doing cartwheels, and only second, the story that took place on the stage.