Misty

an image from the Internet

Last night, after supper, Joyce and I drove down into the Cuyahoga Valley to Szalay's Farm and Market to pick up a few things.

There had been some (mild) storms in the area, and the roads were wet--the Cuyahoga Valley National Park was lush. And as we descended to the river, we saw thick mists rising from the roads, from the farmland and forests. 'Twas gorgeous.
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And so I did what I just had to do, you know? I started singing that old song "Misty."

I didn't get too far--though I did actually remember quite a few of the lyrics. (From Joyce's expression I couldn't tell if she was touched that I was singing--or relieved that I'd stopped.)

I guessed, as we talked about the song, that it was Nat King Cole who'd done the version I remembered.

But, no, I just checked: It was Johnny Mathis. (Link to video of song.) And I see that Ella Fitzgerald released a version, too. (Here's a link to her performance.) Others have done it, too (including Frank Sinatra)--as you can quickly discover on Google and YouTube.

BTW: Just to show you how times have changed: When I started typing "Johnny Mathis" into Google, it suggested, instead, that I wanted "Johnny Manziel."

I see on Wikipedia that pianist Erroll Garner wrote the music in 1954 (and recorded it)--with lyrics added later by Johnny Burke, who wrote them at Mathis' request. It reached #12 on the charts--and sold a couple million copies and became, says Wikipedia, Mathis' "signature song"--which makes even more egregious my failure to identify the singer performing in my memory.

Mathis released "Misty" on September 14, 1959. I was about to turn 15 and had just begun my sophomore year at Hiram High School. It quickly became a standard at our soc hops and dances.

I had a number of passions in 1959 (schoolwork was manifestly not one of them*), including basketball, girls, baseball, girls. My voice had recently changed from that of a Vienna Choir Boy to something a little more like a warthog in agony (okay, not quite that bad), and I was involved in a lot of activities at school--band (cornet), choir (!), various clubs, and school plays.

In fact, when Mathis released the song, we Hiram Huskies were already in rehearsal for Masquerade in Vienna, an adapted version of Johann Strauss' light operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat).

I had somehow acquired the male lead and was playing Dr. Falke, who, I see in my copy of the old program, was "a notary, with a flair for dramatics." Hmmmmm. The operetta begins with Dr. Falke waking up in the woods where some waggish friends have abandoned him.

I vow revenge--I sing a solo ("Yes, Tis I!")--and off we go.

I have one grim memory of that production. The director--the wonderful Mrs. Ruthana Dreisbach--had contacted Aurora High School (eleven miles away) about our bringing the show over there; they agreed; we performed it for a school assembly in the afternoon on the gym floor in the old Aurora High, the building which would, by 1966, become the Aurora Middle School, where I began my teaching career--and where I, too, would direct productions on that gym floor (the first in the spring of 1967).

I fiercely ignored the audience that day. I had played basketball and baseball against some of them, and I imagined those guys sitting on the bleachers, crafting insults they could deliver later that year when we ran up and down the basketball court--or when I stepped up to bat.

When I started teaching in Aurora, I was worried that some unpleasant echoes of "Yes, 'Tis I!" would still be reverberating in that gym. They were--but only I, apparently, could hear them.

Anyway, the mists were beautiful last evening down in the Valley--and the memories here have actually caused a different kind of mist to begin to rise ...


* I just looked at my sophomore grades: for the year I had a C+ average in Latin II, B+ in English.