Tiny Tuesday! and Song Challenge: Day 19

Today’s song challenge is “a song that makes you think about life.” Oddly, one of the first songs that came to mind evoked Judy Collins, and though she recorded it, it’s the signature song of its composer, a different female artist.

Then I realized Judy Collins had a 1975 hit with a different song that also makes me think about life, a Stephen Sondheim composition from A Little Night Music, “Send in the Clowns.” Collins received a Grammy for “Best Song of the Year” in 1976 for her rendition. The song was frequently performed by the character Doug Williams on “Days Of Our Lives” in the years when I watched that daytime drama. Funny that the Time cover celebrating soap operas came out the same month Collins won that Grammy and featured “Doug and Julie,” played by real-life married couple Bill Hayes and Susan Seaforth Hayes. I’m not sure if he’d performed the song on the show before the Grammy win, or if that’s when the writers decided to make it Doug and Julie’s song because the characters were so star-crossed in their relationship.

A favorite memory of mine is living on the bottom floor of an apartment in Tuscaloosa and watching Doug and Julie’s wedding on TV. It was the kind of moment that you wish you could share with another viewer (now we have social media for that!), and I remember being so happy and walking outside just as the girl from the upstairs apartment came out. She looked happy, too, and we smiled at each other. “I know it’s dumb,” I called up, “but I’m SO HAPPY Doug and Julie just got married on my soap opera!” “ME, TOO!” she said, having also just watched it, and thus a friendly acquaintance based on a soap opera began.

Years later, I watched the wedding of the characters Luke and Laura from “General Hospital” with a theater full of people at Ferguson, the student center at Bama, where cake and punch were served to us in their honor. Soaps were a BIG DEAL to college students. In graduate school, I took my daily lunch break in the TV room at Ferguson to watch “The Young and the Restless” with other students (I didn’t own a TV anyway, but it was fun to sit with a diverse group of people and react to the show.)

I don’t have clown phobia, but I couldn’t think of anything at the Hall close to a clown to photograph to tie the song challenge to Tiny Tuesday. Then I remembered this little item from the toy box: the character Nemo from the movie Finding Nemo,, who is a CLOWNFISH. =)