Stephen Sondheim – Judy Collins – Send In The Clowns
My father does not collect much art. But when I was a toddler, around the time he divorced my mother, he started collecting clowns.
“A person’s art is often their heart on their sleeve.”
To this day, he has several paintings of clowns decorating his home. He has a sculpture of a clown smoking a cigar and taking a bath fully clothed. He has a painting of a clown literally sitting atop the world and floating amongst the clouds. He has a sad clown looking at the stock market crash headlines of the Wall Street Journal. My father, for reasons I will not delineate or speculate here, has for a long time felt some connection with and affinity for clowns.
While I am not a similar fan of clowns, I do love Judy Collins’ version of Stephen Sondheims “Send in the Clowns” from his musical A Little Night Music.
“Send in the Clowns” lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim (as sung by Judy Collins):
Isn’t it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground
You in mid-air
Where are the clowns?
Isn’t it bliss?
Don’t you approve?
One who keeps tearing around
One who can’t move
Where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns
Just when I’d start
Opening doors
Finally knowing
The one that I wanted was yours
Making my entrance again
With my usual flair
Sure of my lines
No one is there
Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want
Sorry, my dear
But where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns
Don’t bother they’re here
Isn’t it rich?
Isn’t it queer?
Losing my timing this late
In my career
But where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns
Well maybe next year . . .
© All rights reserved by Stephen Sondheim.
Send In The Clowns on Wikipedia
You can hear the above song here.
Or watch her sing it here.
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Dear Sia:
“Judith” was the second album I ever bought. I used to listen to “Clowns” over and over again hoping for a clue how to figure out my high school girlfriend.
Judy Collins was romantically involved with Stephen Stills for a while. She was the inspiration for the Crosby, Stills, and Nash hit,
“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
Its not hard to see why.
JG
P.S. Clowns freak me out.
“A person’s art is often their heart on their sleeve” no doubt, but only if it is subjective, as in the autobiographical works like David Copperfield, a novel by Charles Dickens and various works of Leo Tolstoy including Childhood etc.(for detail see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_novel). However, it is not the case always: Artists play diverse roles, the writers write on plethora of topics and painters paint on lot many themes.
Further, human identification with stage actors, including clowns, appears in works of artists cutting across civilisations, for example in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players….) and in famous Indian actor and director Raj Kapoor’s film named Mera Naam Joker (My Name is Joker), in which he played the lead role of a joker.
Joker, interalia, is a symbol of a being who makes the world happy, even when it’s own heart is broken and sad. His personal existance is lost, as was that of the masked stage actors of the Ancient Greece, to sink beneath their veneer. Nonetheless, it is dam difficult to say whether it was subjective (personal/ identification) or objective in a given case.
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OneMoreOption: Interesting