"Biography: Irving Berlin: An American Song" (2001)

I'm not super familiar with A&E Biography not subscribing to cable as I do, and the brief bursts of cable contact during hotel stays and such always seemed to lead to other choices.  Tonight seemed to be the night to actually get around to watching this particular episode, one I've had on the shelf for awhile.

Amazing.

I've had some negative after affects from some biographical productions--not for the quality of the production so much as sometimes what you get when you start digging into the behind the scenes information of people's lives yields information you didn't really want and results that you didn't expect to get.  And after a particularly negative experience that has long since "scarred" me, I've since been a little "gun shy" for watching them--which is why this particular one has been on my shelf for so long.  This biography, happily, did not have that effect.  Not only did enjoy learning new things (a consistent joy to me), but I was able to make some other connections, too.  There were the songs I'd come to know from my music days when music was so much more a part of my life--songs that had showed up in teaching jazz band, songs on my shelf to be played for pleasure on my clarinet and piano.  All these songs now had a context for a life, and in some instances a specific context.  Much of this, I guess, I expected and anticipated.  What I didn't anticipate was the movie connection.  A number of the movies that had Irving Berlin connections were ones that I was either quite familiar with or were ones that I've seen within the last few years.  "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1938), "This Is the Army" (1943), "Easter Parade" (1948), "Annie Get Your Gun" (1950), and "Call Me Madam" (1953), as well as "Holiday Inn" were movies that when this biography referenced them, I could say not only "I've seen that!" and "I've seen that, too!", but I felt I knew exactly what they were talking about when they were musically chaptering them.  Other than name recognition of "Irving Berlin", I'd never really thought about how all of these strung together.  And when this biography did all of that, all I could do was say, "wow".

I mean, when the biography referenced the "This Is the Army" appearance of Irving Berlin himself, and the crowd's reception, and some of the other things said.  I could say, "I remember that moment!"  And remember being amazed myself when I originally saw that scene to go "That's Irving Berlin!" with my jaw dropping.   And then, to learn that he was very much quite alive during 18 years of my life, that he lived a full year plus past when my dad lived, I'm filled with thrilled amazement and dismay that such an "institution" to American culture would be out of my knowledge until now.  And his adaptive achievements--wow.

Amazing.