Do You Believe in Magic - the Lovin' Spoonful
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
As well as inviting the Islington "tea dance mafia" to our Islington Pensioners Christmas party the following year (see last post), we hired a large hall in Finsbury so we could give a slap-up dinner and dance to them all, including the residents of five old peoples' homes, who were ferried in on coaches and sat at tableclothed round tables, with napkins and silver cutlery, their zimmer frames, stacked carefully in a large storeroom usually used for surplus coats. Besides the ever-reliable strict time dance band "Dave McQuater and friends", we had hired Fay Presto, an absolutely amazing magician, for the event. She did a great show as well as working the tables with a series of tricks that were mind boggling. At one point she somehow magicked a marked £5 note into my wallet in my jacket, having first burnt it to cinders in an ashtray in front of me.
Evidence of the best bit of magic of the day became apparent after our guests had all left. A full half hour after the hundred or so old people had trooped onto their coaches and been driven off, tired, full, a little dazed but very happy, someone discovered that they had, without exception, left their zimmer frames behind. Whether this minor miracle should be attributed to Fay's spell, or the uplifting effect of Dave McQuater's strict time dance music or even the friendly patter of deejay for the day, the Mighty Neville, is rendered unsolvable by the passage of time, but I reckon it was the magic combination of all three along with the general seasonal feeling of goodwill.
Around Christmas I attended a "cabaret" night that platformed new acts or established more entertainers who were trying out new material. The evening had a unifying theme of magic, at times very loosely applied by some of the performers. One was a stand-up comic who entertained the fairly young audience, (20 - 40 years old - I should qualify, nearly everyone looks "young" to me nowadays), with a diatribe against male magicians who were over and over again described as "c***s" which was fair enough, although the repeated use of "that" word didn't seem to have the desired effect of becoming more amusing, but rather, after the first ten or so renditions, somewhat less so. To press home her point, the comedienne finished by observing that, Fay Presto, the first woman to have become a member of the Magic Circle, the "world's premier magic society", was thrown out of that society when they realised she was a woman.
Just after the break, the excellent organiser and compere invited members of the audience get on stage and do a turn, and when no-one volunteered, exhorted them to "get up or even just from the floor, and sing a song, tell a joke, recite a limerick, anything". At the word "limerick" I responded and proceeded to recite a limerick I had written around 1980, of which I was quite proud. The limerick is as follows:
There was a young poet from Majorca
who woke up in bed with a porker.
He'd been fooled by the pig
who'd been wearing a wig
and reciting choice verses from Lorca.
As I read this, I was aware of a sharp communal intake of breath when I reached the end of the second line, and the conclusion of the verse was met by only a sparse smattering of applause. Afterwards I asked my daughters, some of whom were also at the event, what I'd done wrong. They explained that the use of the word "porker" had offended many of the audience because it meant someone who was fat and was therefore "fattist" ie discriminated against a person of higher weight.
In my copy of the 1987 reissue of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1983 edition, the definition of the word "porker" is: "A young hog fattened for pork; also any pig raised for food". The definition is preceded by the date 1657, which is the earliest use of the word that can be found ie the word has been used with that meaning from 1657 to 1987, some 330 years, at least.
It wasn't until that moment in 2025, after I had recited my limerick that I realised the meaning had changed since I wrote it.
After the show I chatted with the comedienne, telling her that I had hired Fay Presto for events in the past, and while doing so realised that she had no idea that Fay Presto had been a man when he/she (ie Fay) joined the Magic Circle and had been asked to leave when she began to transition, and self-identify as a woman. (Later, in 1991, when the Magic Circle changed their rules to allow women to become members, she rejoined.) She may have been busy, but she didn't seem particularly interested in this fact, surprisingly as she had just used Presto to make a telling point about gender in her act. Maybe she didn't want to hear it from a boring old man, especially one who'd just been publicly fattist. Maybe she'd never heard of Lorca.
I couldn't help wondering how the audience would have reacted if I had delivered her comic monologue, complete with its litany of "c***s".
While I unreservedly agree that one shouldn't negatively stigmatise those "of a higher weight", I do wish that people would take into consideration meaning, intention, nuance and context before condemning others who are trying to communicate. Communication means listening and not jumping to conclusions before hearing someone out. The next two lines of the poem clearly revealed that in this context "porker" meant "pig" but I suspect that by this time most of the audience had stopped listening.
The African American novelist Percival Everett, who wrote the excellent "James", a rendering of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" from the point of view of the runaway slave character, Jim, has said that anyone who wants to ban "Huckleberry Finn" either hasn't read it or doesn't understand it. It is the over-politically-correct cancel culture, often mischaracterised as being "woke", that has helped make it so easy for MAGA exponents to gain traction in recent years.
The Lovin' Spoonful had magical beginnings, the two founder members John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky meeting for the first time in February 1964 at a party hosted by Cass Eliot (later of the Mamas and the Papas) to watch the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
"Do You Believe in Magic" was the Lovin' Spoonful's first single release and first hit, reaching number nine in the US in the summer of 1965. Lead singer and songwriter John Sebastian was entranced by the dancing of a sixteen year old girl when they performed at a Greenwich Village café. Perhaps because she was so young, she didn't dance in the then fashionable, introverted beatnik style and her freedom, joy and lack of self-consciousness inspired him to write "Magic":
"Do you believe in magic, in a young girl's heart?
How the music can free her whenever it starts?
And it's magic, if the music is groovy
it makes you feel happy like an old-time movie.
I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul
but it's like tryin' tell a stranger 'bout-a rock 'n' roll."
In this information-laden world we live in now, has this kind of magic, this kind of innocence, gone forever?
Comments