This blog's traditional way of celebrating Edith Piaf's birthday Dec. 19 - LA VIE EN ROSE parody

 This blog's traditional way of celebrating Edith Piaf's birthday Dec. 19 -

LA VIE EN ROSE parody by Fred Landau

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Z6iz4jPsw  

Thank you to the wonderful Jan Horvath for the vocal here. 

The U.S. Post Office Piaf Forever stamp was 2012, and even then we were worried about how snail-like "snail mail" was.  (The snail makes a guest appearance at 0:30 and this is believed to be the post office snail's only appearance in a La Môme parody video.)   

For start of Hannukah, our song "Put Your Pain In the Hands of a Jew" - video with Hannukah images

In the spirit of the old line about what many Jewish holidays have in common, "They tried to destroy us, they didn't destroy us, let's eat!" - 

"Put Your Pain In the Hands of a Jew (or a Few)" - with Hannukah images

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53wvYwGE9Z8

Music by Skip Kennon, lyric by Fred Landau - sung here by Neal Mayer

(The expression "oy and vey" is thanks to Bruce Kimmel)

We wrote this song about the soothing aspects of Jewish humor in the face of thousand of years of tsouris, and it turned out not to be right for project we auditioned for.  (When we wrote the song, the show's script that we got had been about humor as essentially Jewish novocaine, and that changed a great deal by the time that show opened.)

But the song survives on YouTube! :) And we get nice reaction to the audition song. even separate from the show for which it had been written, and I wanted to share it here, on this video with Hannukah images.

Remembering my late Aunt Sarah Friedler on her birthday, including a favorite theater-related story about her

 

Remembering my dear late aunt Sarah Friedler on her birthday, here in this photo with my dad, my brother and me at what seems to be my nephew David Landau's bris in 1988. My aunt and my dad were both Holocaust survivors. We all called her Aunt Sunia (pronounced "Shoon-ya"). The camera caught her while she was talking, probably making a joke, but it's such a happy photo of a happy occasion. 

We have so many happy memories of her, including a good amount of theatergoing and theater-watching and listening with her and my Uncle Jonah. One of my favorite theater-related memories of her was after Kathie Lee Gifford performed Sondheim's "Getting Married Today" on TV, my Aunt Sunia did an impromptu impression, with hand motions, of Kathie Lee singing at the wedding "Go! Can't you go? Why is nobody listening?" (This was while Kathie Lee was the alternate for Carol Burnett in "Putting It Together.")