Possibly the worst two weeks of our lives, but I’m getting over the depression and trying to get on with fighting the Monsters of the Id. And dancing...
This picture is a scene from the 1936 Astaire/Rodgers film ‘Follow the Fleet’. Fred has just lost everything at the roulette table (with a blonde Lucille Ball looking over his shoulder) and goes out onto the terrace of the casino (not exactly Nice or Cannes or Monte Carlo but symbolic of all of them). He finds Ginger just about to leap over the parapet…
And then, they sing and dance to Irving Berlin’s greatest masterpiece, with hints of Eastern European Jewish fatalism and melancholy:
There may be trouble ahead
But while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance
Let’s face the music and dance
Before the fiddlers have fled
Before they ask us to pay the bill
And while we still have a chance
Let’s face the music and dance
Soon, we’ll be without the moon
Singing a different tune,
But then….
It’s been recorded wonderfully by Ella Fitzgerald and Diana Krall.