‌The Maestro and Me

A few Halloweens ago, right before the pandemic, of the dozen or so children who knocked on the door of our condo in Princeton, only a few were white or black Americans. Most were Asian, Indian or Hispanic. They were accompanied by parents or grandparents who didn’t seem too sure about what was going on. As we opened the door, we were besieged by GI Joes, princesses with tiaras, pirates with eye patches. One chubby Asian boy kept shouting, “I am Spider Man! I am Spider Man!” Embarrassed, his grandmother finally pulled him away from the door.

Growing up in the Miami of the 1960s, I was that Asian kid. Since I lived in Little Havana rather than in the Garden State, my “Americanization” didn’t happen through direct contact with Americans—I hardly knew any—but by the cultural proxy of music, movies, TV shows. Like other immigrant children, I led a double life. In my Cuban life, the past flooded the present. In my American life, the present crawled toward the future. The former fed on memories; the latter, on daydreams. Even as I looked forward to returning to my homeland, I absorbed the way of life portrayed on sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show. (Shelley Fabares singing “Johnny Angel” was the stuff adolescent dreams are made of.) It didn’t matter that what I saw on the screen had nothing to do with the way we lived. If anything, the disparity drew me in. Ward Cleaver or Dr. Stone came home from work and settled into a comfortable chair with a newspaper. My father came home with the latest rumors about the imminent collapse of the Castro regime. (You know how that turned out.)

With the partial exception of My Three Sons, grandparents were not part of any of these TV households. Ours included two grandmothers who seldom spoke to each other, the teenage son of a family friend and, intermittently, relatives and friends who arrived from Cuba and stayed with us until they found a place to live. It seemed as though every other week my parents packed us into the Rambler station wagon and we headed to the Miami airport to greet relatives and friends arriving from Cuba. If there was ever an airport scene on Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show, I don’t recall it.

I didn’t watch TV or listen to top-forty music on the sly. What was secret, at least to me, was the way my engagement with America was changing me. A small incident from my high school years sticks in my mind. | was coming back from a party in a friend’s car when “You Belong to Me,” interpreted by the The Duprees, came on the radio. I began to sing along. Surprised that I knew the lyric, Carlos said to me: “Eres tremendo mechero de musica americana.” Mechero (from mecha, wick) is slang for a bookworm, someone who burns the midnight oil. He was saying that I was a doo-wop nerd, though I had no particular reason to be. I couldn’t sing, didn’t play an instrument, and the only music I could dance to was Cuban, which was all I heard on the record player at home.

It came as a revelation that there was something odd about knowing the words to “You Belong to Me.” I knew many other songs like it, which I picked up, as kids do, by listening to them a few times. Not that my lyrics were always accurate, however. Because my English was competent but limited, and perhaps because my hearing wasn’t great even then, I sometimes engaged in lyric imprecision. Another song I liked was “Linda” by Jan and Dean. Part of the lyric says: “I can’t help feeling gloomy, / thinking ‘bout the loving I missed.” Apparently | didn’t know the adjective “gloomy,” since what I heard was “blue-y,” and “blue-y” it stayed for years. In Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime,” when Dean sings “overdue,” I heard “all for you.” Sometimes when I couldn’t make out the word at all, I’d put in a nonsense word. Another of Dean’s songs was “Love Me, Love Me,” where he asks the girl to “make this evening a magic night.” Since I had a Dean Martin cassette in my car (an uncharacteristic gift from my cubano-phile father), I heard this song over and over, but I couldn’t make out “a magic night.” The only word | could think of that fit was “formaldehyde.” So in my version the romantic request came out as: “make this evening formaldehyde.” They're not called dummy lyrics for nothing.

But my most durable engagement with Americana came from an unlikely source. Flashback to the Fall of 1962. I’m twelve years old. On Saturday night, while my parents are visiting friends, an old-country custom that still survived in the new country, I’m sprawled on the tan carpet in front of the TV set with the illuminated image of the Sacred Heart on the top. I’m listening to the Lennon Sisters, prim and pretty in party dresses (my favorite is Kathy), sing “Easy to Remember” on The Lawrence Welk Show. Now fastforward five years to 1967. I’m a senior in high school and it’s Saturday night again. The color TV in the Florida room has replaced the black and white console. By then the appearances of the Lennon Sisters on The Lawrence Welk Show have become less frequent, but it doesn’t matter. While my friends are out on dates, I’m still glued to the TV watching the champagne-music makers. As it was in the life of many Americans a generation or two older than I, The Lawrence Welk Show had become a fixture in mine.

I don’t recall exactly when my habit began, but it was long before 1965, when the show went to color, and not long after we arrived from Cuba on October 24, 1960. The bubble machine didn’t do anything for me, but | liked seeing the well-dressed audience dance for the cameras, even if the fox-trots, waltzes and polkas were unfamiliar to me, as were the program’s sponsors, Geritol and Sominex (“Take Sominex tonight and sleep, safe and restful sleep, sleep, sleep”). Some part of me identified with Welk’s difficulties with the English language. Like me, he didn’t grow up in an English-speaking household. But the main reason I watched was curiosity about segments of American culture that I knew nothing about: Big Bands, the Great American Songbook, the Protestant hymnal. Others may have watched to reminisce. I watched to discover.

By the time I reached the end of my teens, I had other things to do on Saturday nights, and when I left Miami to attend graduate school, I stopped watching the Welk show altogether. For the next twenty years, while I made my way as a professor of Latin American Literature, there was little time to pay attention to what was happening outside the classroom or the library. Teaching at Duke University and married to another Cuban exile, we joked that we resided in Chapel Hill but that we lived in Miami: in the language we spoke, the music we listened to, the palm-tree posters on the walls. When we had children, we spoke to them in Spanish. If we needed a babysitter, we made sure that she too spoke Spanish. No man is an island, but a home can be one.

My island floated away—or I swam away from it—when I divorced Rosa and married an American woman. In Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman writes that by falling in love with an American, she fell in love with otherness. That was also true of me, except that in some ways I had been in love with “otherness,” American style, for a long time. Growing up in Havana, I studied English in school, saw Hollywood movies, and travelled once a year to the States with my parents. One of my prized possessions was a wooden Western fort that I picked up during one of our trips. Another was a set of olive-green WWII toy soldiers. Even my mother’s nickname for me, “Junior” (my father was also Gustavo), portended an American future. But I didn’t anticipate that one day I’d marry someone who claimed that before meeting me the only Cuban she knew was Ricky Ricardo.

A decade into our marriage, I took a job at Columbia University and began to commute between Chapel Hill and New York City. I’d fly up early on Tuesday morning and return on the last flight on Thursday night. In between I’d teach my classes, meet with students, and perform what universities call “service,” which usually means doing hard time on pointless committees. Since I wasn’t home for most of the week, Mary Anne and I made Saturday evening our stay-at-home “date night.” At the time our local PBS station, WUNC, broadcast Welk reruns on Saturday at 8 pm. We began to watch them. For me, they evoked memories of the early days in Miami, before exile had begun to take a toll on my family. For Mary Anne, they reminded her of visits to her grandparents in the Bronx. Like me, they were Welk fans.

Without thinking about it too much, we got into the habit of tuning in every Saturday after dinner. I remembered some of the cast, but since the reruns favored color broadcasts from the 1970s and early 80s, some of the performers were new to me. I especially liked the wraparound segments during which Mary Lou Metzger, who referred to Welk as “The Maestro,” would interview someone from the cast. Despite the dyed hair, the heavy makeup and the added pounds, most of the performers looked like themselves. The one painful exception was Charlotte Harris, the only woman in the orchestra, who played the cello. The lovely young lady in crinoline dresses that I remembered and had just seen again in that evening’s rerun had aged into a stout, school-marmish woman with a voice as deep as her instrument’s low register.

After the weekly commute, the Welk reruns had a restorative effect, relief as well as reassurance. Come Saturday night, the fret and fevers of the week set aside, we’d be nestled in bed, sharing a vanilla éclair and seeing Mary Lou and Jack Imel, dressed up in Victorian bathing suits, singing “By the Beautiful Sea.” Even after we moved to New Jersey and my commute became shorter and less stressful, the routine stuck. In the bedroom of our third floor condo, illuminated only by the parking lot lights beyond the windows, we watched week after week. As the final credits rolled by against a sky-blue background, we sang along with the chorus: “Good night, sleep tight and pleasant dreams to you. / Here’s a wish and a prayer that every dream comes true.” The highpoint of our sing-along was the multilingual valedictory: “Adios, Au revoir, Auf Wiedersehen, Good night!” Watching reruns of The Lawrence Welk Show may not be everyone’s idea of foreplay, but it worked for us.

The performers I enjoyed the most were those who, very gently, pushed the envelope. Busty Ralna English’s take-no-prisoners voice and modestly plunging necklines turned religious hymns into torch songs. She reminded me of bolero chanteuses like Olga Guillot, my father’s favorite, or Blanca Rosa Gil, whose nickname, la mufequita que canta (“the little doll that sings”), belied her sultry persona. First trumpet Johnny Zell, a wild man in harness, could barely contain himself. Blowing, he swayed, tapped his feet, bobbed up and down. The story is that when he joined the orchestra he had a reputation for fast living, but then he found religion and settled down. Thankfully, as a musician he remained as uninhibited as ever.

When Jack Imel first joined the show, shortly after leaving the U.S. Navy, his specialty was playing the marimba while tap dancing. At the end of the number, he would drop the sticks, leap over the marimba, and finish his dance with a flourish. As the years went by, no longer capable of such a feat, he transitioned to novelty songs with Mary Lou, whom he taught to tap. It was obvious they liked each other, something that couldn’t be said for the dance team of Bobby and Cissy (who had the best legs on the show) or for Norma Zimmer, the redoubtable “Champagne Lady,” and Jimmy Roberts, the Welk avatar of a 1950s crooner. When they dueted, she seemed not to notice that next to her a handsome middle-aged man was warbling tender words in her ear. With a trench coat slung over his shoulders and the image of a foggy Golden Gate Bridge in the background, Roberts sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” almost as often as Larry Hooper, he of the bottomless voice, sang “Oh Happy Day.”

Myron Floren, a virtuoso accordionist, joined in 1950, just before the start of Welk’s TV career. I liked his accordion solos - “Lady of Spain” was his showpiece—and his dueling with Welk, also an accordionist. The “happy Norwegian,” as Welk tagged him, owned several gold wrist watches. Any time he was featured on the accordion, the jacket sleeve and shirt cuff on his right hand were drawn halfway up his wrist to display one of his timepieces. What I took to be the definitive one, which I noticed for the first time in a 1975 episode, “America’s Wonderland,” had a flat round face and gold mesh bracelet. It was a thing of beauty. | believe it was a Piaget.

The aesthetic antithesis of Myron’s gold watches was Ken Delo’s hair. Delo responded to thinning hair by making a part above his right ear and immobilizing the comb-over with gel. This made it seem that he had a full covering of hair, except that it looked like a helmet. As the years went by, the part got lower and the hair-helmet got shinier. By the time Welk called it quits in 1982, Delo, then in his mid forties, was struggling mightily not to disclose scalp. Nonetheless, he had an affable personality and would go into the audience to serenade old ladies. In his best spots he teamed up with tap-dancer Arthur Duncan to do a sloppy soft shoe. (Duncan, by the way, was the only African American in the cast and the first to be a regular on a weekly variety show.)

A storyline that added suspense to our Saturdays centered on Ralna and her husband, Guy Hovis, “America’s sweethearts of song.” In one of the wraparounds, Ralna mentioned that she and Guy had separated toward the end of the show’s run. From then on, I looked for signs of trouble in their marriage. In their early appearances (Ralna joined the cast in 1969 and Guy a year later), she would gaze lovingly into his eyes and he'd answer with a wide, capped-tooth smile. The feeling they put into “Feelings,” a song I like in spite of the redundant idiocy of its lyrics, made it seem that they were celebrating rather than lamenting their feelings of love.

As the years went by, their stage vibes began to change. By the late 1970s, she no longer looked at him as Aphrodite upon Adonis, nothing but dazzled admiration in her glittering eyes. If Guy noticed her strained gestures of affection, he didn’t let on. His standard-issue Southern warmth remained unchanged. The climax to their story, or what I took to be their story, occurred on the 1981 Thanksgiving show. By then the sweethearts of song had soured. Yet they chose (or, more likely, were told) to perform “A House with Love in It,” a woefully inopportune selection. When they finished, Ralna tilted her head toward Guy’s chest. Ten years earlier he would have responded with a gentle squeeze or peck on the cheek. This time he didn’t budge. His stolidity said: “That’s close enough, honey.” As the camera cut away, she looked disconsolate. Guy eventually remarried. Ralna never did.

For almost twenty years we watched the reruns with trepidation, fearing that at some point OETA, the Oklahoma PBS affiliate, would stop repackaging original broadcasts. At the end of every rerun I made sure to look at the year it was produced. Since the credits gave the year in Roman numerals, I had to do some quick figuring. If the rerun had been produced not long before, I felt a sense of relief. But any time a fund-raising special pre-empted an episode, I worried that the end had arrived. Finally it did, seven or eight years ago, when WUNC changed its Saturday evening lineup. Fortunately I had recorded about two dozen shows, which allowed us to continue to indulge our Welk routine. But when we upgraded our Direct TV receiver, the recordings were lost forever, something I had not foreseen. Some time later we bought a boxed DVD set with 63 episodes. Every once in a while Mary Anne suggests that we begin to watch them, but up to now I’ve demurred.

Part of it is laziness. It’s simpler to click on the TV than to operate a cranky DVD player that we stopped using years ago. But the truth is that I’m apprehensive that watching again would upset me. For many years, before I retired from teaching, we knew that on Saturday night we’d see Mary Lou, prettier in middle age than when she was young, introduce a tribute to small towns or songs about far away places. There was an aura to those evenings—magic nights, as in Dean’s “Love Me, Love Me” — that wouldn’t be there now. Old habits are easier to break than resurrect.

But maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe I should relent and give the champagne music makers another turn. The lives of exiles and immigrants are haunted by discontinuity. You speak a different language than you did when you were young. You live in a different place and among different people. Your children resemble you less than you resembled your parents and your grandchildren, if you have any, don’t resemble you at all. So you endeavor, somewhat hopelessly, to patch the rifts. The Maestro once declared: “Music changes, I don’t.” I wish I could say the same for myself, but I’m more like Charlotte the cellist: barely recognizable to someone who knew me sixty years ago. The Lawrence Welk Show, which reflected the immutable tastes of its namesake, responds to my desire for continuity. By continuing to watch, by watching into my last act, perhaps I’d be shoring up the connection, tenuous as it may be, between the old man I’ve become and the pepillo I once was.

In 2005 the still-active cast members put together a special entitled “Precious Memories,” the title of a religious hymn. Many of the old crew appeared, but for me the most memorable performance was Jack Imel’s cover of “Old Bones,” a song popularized by George Burns. By then Imel was in his seventies. Wearing a tux and a straw hat, he came on stage. He was stooped and walked with a limp. Ever the trouper, he gave a spirited reading of the lyric while sitting on a bar stool. When he reached the central lines—“But I love life, I’d like to do it again. / Though I might not be much more that I’ve ever been” —his gravelly voice leaned into the words in a way that underscored the blend of wistfulness and realism at the heart of the song. As the orchestra played the last few bars, he slid off the stool, tipped his hat forward a la Maurice Chevalier, and did a few steps. “I’m still tap dancing,” he said.

Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Gustavo Pérez Firmat is the David Feinson Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Columbia University, where he taught Latin American literature. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other journals. He has authored several poetry collections in Spanish and English as well as a memoir, Next Year in Cuba. Books of literary and cultural criticism include A Cuban in Mayberry, Life on the Hyphen, and Tongue Ties.