"This song was immensely popular during the summer of 1941. I remember its being rendered at an evening entertainment at a yacht club of the period, sund with impressive emotional effect by a twelve-year-old boy soprano, son of one of the proud members. In his little blue blazer and long white duck trousers, he sang (and there was not a dry eye in the house),
My sister and I recall the dayWe said goodbye and sailed away;
And we think of our friends who had to stay–
But we don't talk about that.
The last line, an oft-repeated refrain in the song, proved a gift to the lewd and coarse young Americans soon to be corralled into the army of the United States. At one southern training camp, the troops distilled the song into a brisk mock-incestuous version, thought comically appropriate to family life in the southern states. The soldiers sang:
My sister and I–But we don't talk about that."
–Paul Fussell, "Writing in Wartime: The Uses of Innocence," Thank God for the Atom Bomb
Posted by mesh at April 12, 2006 10:18 AM | TrackBack