59th Street Bridge Song

Listen while you read: Updated version

Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feelin' groovy

Hello, Lamppost, nice to see ya
We might get bombed by North Korea
We're getting close to World War III
So run for the shelters, feelin' groovy

Ba da da da da feelin' groovy

The Arctic's melting, the seas are boiling
These aren't the first pants that I'm soiling
We won't survive the century
We're all doomed, I'm feelin' groovy

Kellyanne Conway makes no sense
And even if Trump goes, we're stuck with Mike Pence
But he might win the big one in twenty-twenty
Nevertheless, all is groovy

Ba da da da da feelin' groovy

~ Paul Simon (with help from Stephen Colbert)

In case you missed it, Paul Simon was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night. (And lest you think that I actually stay up that late, I caught the video on social media this morning.) Although Simon's main feature was his first live performance of the beautiful "Question for the Angels," he and Colbert sang a remake of "59th Street Bridge Song," linked for you above. They began with some banter in which Simon says he loathes that song because it "doesn't sound like 2017." Thanks to Colbert, now it does.

The original "59th Street Bridge Song" was released in 1966 on the iconic Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme. It can still send me back to being a teenager and feeling upbeat and light whenever the song came on the radio. Such a happy, sunny song! And I guess that's why Simon said that it doesn't sound like 2017. Whether it's age or politics or culture (or a combination of all three), the times don't feel so sunny anymore. (At a political fundraiser the other night, we were entertained by Chris Sieber,  known for his performance as Galahad in Spamalot, who sang the Monty Python classic, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." That song always boosts my optimism a few notches, too.)

So what to do? The answer is easy: laugh when you can! Thanks to people like Colbert and Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah and John Oliver and the cast of SNL, there are many opportunities to laugh.  Sure, the topics aren't really funny at all, but laughing seems a better alternative to crying. With any luck at all, maybe we won't get to the point where there's nothing to laugh about anymore and all we can do is cry.

Ba da da da da feelin' groovy. For the moment, anyway.