Thursday, December 24, 2009

A Holiday Gift: The Song and Dance of Sacred Heart

If our Legal Schnauzer team could be granted one broad wish as the holidays approach, it probably would be that our readers (and non-readers, for that matter) receive the gifts of humor and insight in 2010.

As regular readers know, 2009 has not been an easy time in our household. Mrs. Schnauzer and I are both now unemployed, cheated out of our jobs--at Infinity Property & Casualty and UAB, respectively--by an apparent combination of political/corporate interests. That's not fun at any time, and it certainly is stressful in the midst of the worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression.

On a positive note, 2009 marked our 20th anniversary--as a married couple, not as a blog team. Sometimes I wonder how we made it this far, given that God apparently has seen fit to confront us with an unusually large number of evil SOBs over the past 10 years or so.

But we've hung in there, and perhaps even grown stronger. One reason, I suspect, is that we are able to help each other laugh and help each other think. In other words, we somehow have been able to give each other the gifts of humor and insight. And we hope, in some small way, this blog has helped provide those gifts to our readers.

One source of humor and insight for us is the television series Scrubs. Regular readers know that we are huge fans of the gang at Sacred Heart Hospital. In fact, we've made it a sort of holiday tradition to pay tribute to a show that we think is one of the best in television history, right up there with M*A*S*H and The Simpsons. That's awfully fine company.

One of Scrubs many splendid attributes is its creative use of song and dance. At times, the show seems like a cross between West Side Story and Marcus Welby, M.D. It even produced an episode called "My Musical," which was so stunningly brilliant that it should have captured a truck load of Emmys.

Stylus magazine has produced its "Top Ten Music Moments On NBC's Scrubs," and we can't quarrel with any of their selections. But here are a few of our special favorites:

The episode "My Old Lady" is built around the premise that--excepting the maternity ward and emergency room--one out of three patients who enters a hospital will die there. Three of the show's young interns experience patient deaths, and the episode comes to a climax behind Leonard Cohen's haunting "Hallelujah," as sung by Welsh singer-songwriter John Cale:







In "My Philosophy," a patient expresses her hope that death is like a "big Broadway musical" where "you go out with a real flourish." That inspires one of Scrubs' most memorable imaginary moments, featuring the cast's rendition of "Waiting For My Real Life to Begin" by Colin Hay, formerly of Men At Work:





Not all of the Scrubs song-and-dance numbers are about sadness and death--far from it. One of the show's great gut-busting moments comes in "My Half-Acre," when the Janitor's air band cranks up "More Than a Feeling" by Boston:





Finally, "My Night to Remember" features a superb compilation of Scrubs dance numbers, to "Diner" by Martin Sexton:



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