Ella Fitzgerald – "Love for Sale" (1956)

Love for sale

Who will buy?

Who would like to sample my supply?

During my most recent Cape Cod vacation, this Cape Cod Times story caught my eye:

90-YEAR-OLD CHARGED WITH SOLICITING PROSTITUTE

A 90-year-old Dennis Port man was arrested for soliciting a prostitute after reporting that she stole from him.

(Not the real Nicholas Salerno)

Nicholas Salerno paid Karen Proia, 48, of Route 28 in West Dennis, $100 on June 22 to perform a sex act, according to Orleans District Court documents.

He told police she used the bathroom in his house and he later noticed his necklace was missing.  He reported the alleged theft to police June 30, records show.

Police recovered the necklace at Bass River Coin, records state.

A police officer told Salerno he also would be charged with a crime, for soliciting a prostitute, to which Salerno responded, “I don’t give a (expletive). I’m 90 years old,” according to court documents.

Proia is charged with larceny and prostitution.  She and Salerno pleaded not guilty at their arraignments Tuesday.

If you're like me, you want to know exactly what sex act Mr. Salerno paid $100 for.  You also want to know exactly what expletive he used.

The answer to those questions can be found in a Dennis Police Department report that I located online.  Click here to read the report.

It's not clear from the police report whether Ms. Proia gave Mr. Salerno an AARP discount, or whether $100 is her regular fee for the specified service.

The comments on the Cape Cod Times article that were posted on the newspaper's website were pretty good.  

Here’s the comment that Phill B posted:

The American is 90 years old, and a female prostitue [sic] took advantage of this guy. The prostitue [sic] should be fined, forced community service, maybe thrown in jail.  Maybe.  Tired of the tax dollars wasted.  But No Refund for Services Rendered, or not Supplied!

(There’s a lot of food for thought in that comment, isn’t there?)

A reader named Alan Janssens had this to say:

Here is an example of when a law should be changed . . . Look at the rape and other sexual assault statistics in the U.S (I wouldn't send a daughter to most universities) . . . look a[t] the arrests for simple nudity at beaches.  U.S. culture breeds sex crimes online . . . prostitution . . . it's not illegal everywhere in the U.S. . . . and should be regulated like home nursing aides . . .  oooooops there I go again. 90 years old . . . you go boy !!!!!!

(I couldn’t have said it better myself.)

Finally, here’s a pithy comment from Jacob Aubel:

I love everything about this article.

As do I, Mr. Aubel . . . as do I.

* * * * *

Cole Porter wrote “Love for Sale” for the musical The New Yorkers, which opened on Broadway in 1930.

Not surprisingly, many people were scandalized by the song, which is sung by a prostitute offering “appetizing young love for sale” to any man who is “prepared to pay the price for a trip to paradise.”  

In response to the criticism, the show’s producers took the song away from the white singer who originally portrayed May the streetwalker and gave it to an African-American singer.  Problem solved!

The New Yorkers was based on a story by Ray Goetz and Peter Arno (a legendary cartoonist who created 99 New Yorker covers and contributed countless cartoons to the magazine).  It starred Jimmy Durante, who wrote all five of the numbers that he sang, and featured Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.  

Here’s Ella Fitzgerald's 1956 recording of “Love for Sale”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Cole Porter -- "Too Darn Hot" (1948)

I'd like to stop for my baby tonight

And blow my top with my baby tonight

But I'd be a flop with baby tonight

'Cause it's too darn hot

Cole Porter’s musical, Kiss Me, Kate, opened on Broadway in 1948 – before most American homes had air conditioners.  

One of the reasons my in-laws bought a house on Cape Cod sixty-plus years ago was to escape the awful heat and humidity of summers in Washington, DC.  Now that we have air conditioning in our homes and cars, my family usually suffers more from the heat and humidity on Cape Cod than we do in Washington.  

Fortunately, the Cape Playhouse – where we recently enjoyed a revival of Kiss Me, Kate -- has excellent air-conditioning.

Here's a photo of the Cape Playhouse that I took as we were walking to the performance:

Here's a picture of the Playhouse in the daylight:

The Cape Playhouse, which claims to be the oldest professional summer theatre in America,  opened in 1927.  The star of the first production was Basil Rathbone, a famous British actor who was best known for portraying Sherlock Holmes in fourteen movies that were filmed between 1939 and 1946.  

Other stars who have appeared at the Cape Playhouse include Bette Davis (who worked at the theatre as an usher first), Gregory Peck, Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart, Helen Hayes, and the 18-year-old Jane Fonda.

A very young (and very blonde) Bette Davis

Kiss Me, Kate is about the production of a modern-day play based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.  The play within the play opens in Baltimore – where the weather is just “too darn hot.” 

The leading man and leading lady are a divorced couple who are still strongly attracted to one another, but the course of true love never did run smooth (to quote Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).  Of course, there’s a happy ending – this is a Broadway musical, after all – but the two stars spend most of the play fighting like cats and dogs.

The Taming of the Shrew scores low when it comes to political correctness.  The plot revolves around the determination of a wealthy father to find a husband for his elder daughter, Katherina – a stubborn, man-hating shrew who wants no part of marital bliss.
  

When Petruchio, a suitor who is motivated by greed, shows up and begins to pitch woo, the shrew fights him tooth and nail.  But he uses reverse psychology to turn her into a very obedient wife.  

I remember seeing the 1967 Franco Zefferelli-directed movie of The Taming of the Shrew, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  Taylor's Kate defies Burton's Petruchio at the end of the movie, undercutting what appears to be Shakespeare's misogyny and making the movie more palatable to modern audiences. 

Taylor and Burton's romance began during the 1963 filming of Cleopatra (the most expensive film ever made if inflation is taken into account).  Both were married at the time, but they both managed to get divorced and married each other in 1964.  The infamously stormy marriage ended in 1974, but the couple remarried the next year, separating for good shortly thereafter.  (Their relationship somewhat mirrors that of the two main characters in Kiss Me, Kate.)

Kiss Me, Kate goes a step farther than Shakespeare's play did – Petruchio not only plays mind games with Kate, but eventually puts the shrew over his knee and gives her a good spanking to make her behave.  It’s not easy for a modern-day audience to accept Kate’s transformation from independent-minded woman to submissive wife – especially when that transformation is accomplished largely through assault and battery – but the Cape Playhouse production downplayed this aspect of the plot enough to make the outcome palatable.

Cole Porter was one of the greatest American songwriters of all time.  He learned the violin and piano when he was a child, and began to write songs at a young age.  When he attended Yale, he was a member of the original Whiffenpoofs, the oldest and most famous collegiate a cappella group.

But Porter’s wealthy and domineering grandfather wanted him to be a lawyer, not a musician, so he went to Harvard Law School after graduating from Yale.  (His first-year roommate was Dean Acheson, who was Secretary of State in the Truman Administration.)  Porter didn’t enjoy his legal studies, and with the dean of the law school’s encouragement, he enrolled in Harvard’s music school.  He and his mother kept the move secret from his grandfather.

Cole Porter was a lefty

Porter married a wealthy divorcee who was eight years his senior when he was 28.  His wife was well aware that he was a homosexual when they wed, but their marriage of convenience seems to have been satisfactory to both – they remained married until she died 35 years later, and were by all accounts quite devoted to one another.

It’s interesting that Porter’s greatest Broadway success was a play about a tempestuous but passionate heterosexual love affair.  The contrast between his characters’ relationship and his relationship with his wife – which was devoid of romance or sex, but always friendly and pleasant – could not be greater.

Porter had a way with words -- that might be the understatement of the century -- and he was never more clever than in "Too Darn Hot."  Here’s the original Broadway cast recording of “Too Darn Hot," which has more double entendres than you can shake a stick at:

Here's a video from the 2002 UK production.  The staging and choreography is very similar to what we saw at the Cape Playhouse:



Click below if you’d like to buy the song from Amazon: