Reading with ravishment Ethan Mordden's "Buddy" novels. Dazzling writing--and the man is so prolific. I'm inspired to do a little revision-of, or a little adding-to, my own musical/esthetic history.

I suppose it warps you to be exposed to a full-scale Broadway version of Kismet, the way Mordden was, at age only six. You're not old enough then to appreciate how vulgar, how trashily sentimental, how stupidly derivative this worst of Broadway musicals is, with its one tawdry tune stolen from Borodin's already monotonous Polivitzian Dance[s], and its oh-so-lame second-hand exoticism. Naturally, he was enthralled, infected, poisoned by it; he was too young to develop anti-bodies, and so his taste (and judgement) was forever warped and stunted by it. Pity. It happens. I know of a similar case, of a boy who attended the movie Gone with the Wind when he was only nine, and thought that the soundtrack was beautiful, and so lost the ability to tell when female opera singers have lost their voice: He was applauding Maria Callas when it was no longer possible to tell which was 'Sempre Libera' and which was a breaking champagne glass.

I thank my lucky stars that I was ten years old, full of anti-bodies, and already a perfervid hater of "musical" comedy when I first, and last, saw the movie version of Kismet. I had been hoping for a Burt Lancaster acrobatic/adventure movie. Well you may imagine therefore that by the second or third effusion of heterosexual sediment--perhaps fifteen minutes into it--I was leading my fellow sufferers in throwing popcorn at the screen, making fart-noises, and singing our own rude songs over the feculent drivel being crooned at us. I daresay we drowned it out--or at least made it impossible for anyone else to enjoy it.