Sunday Pages: "Good Riddance, But Now What?" and "Lucas With the Lid Off"

A poem by Ogden Nash and a song by Lucas Secon

Dear Reader,

As 2023 draws to a close, I feel anxious knowing that the year to come will be among the most momentous in U.S. history. Fascism—with its hateful herald, antisemitism—is on the rise, here and abroad. So is covid. Two of our allies are at war. The climate clock ticks on relentlessly. The GOP is poised to nominate Donald John Trump—failed president, crook, serial rapist, insurrectionist, and wannabe dictator—as its top-of-the-ticket candidate, even as he awaits trial on not one, not two, not three, but four indictments. Those trials will all take place in 2024. Oh, and in November, we will decide whether to re-elect President Biden or throw away our democracy. And no matter which option we choose, some sort of chaos is bound to ensue.

Pass the Pepcid. Scratch that; pass the bourbon.

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The poet Ogden Nash—one of my favorites—is famous for his light verse, his clever wordplay, his dark humor, and his flair for the absurd. He is best known for his seven-word poem about the efficacy of party icebreakers: “Candy is dandy / But liquor is quicker.”

Looking up that quote, in the vain hope of finding the poem’s title, I stumbled across a longer work of his, new to me, about the magical ingredients in cocktails. Here is a sample verse from “A Drink With Something In It:”

There is something about an old-fashioned
That kindles a cardiac glow;
It is soothing and soft and impassioned
As a lyric by Swinburne or Poe.
There is something about an old-fashioned
When dusk has enveloped the sky,
And it may the ice,
Or the pineapple slice,
But I strongly suspect it’s the rye.

Unsurprisingly, this comic genius wrote a short poem about New Year’s Eve. Its title sums up my feelings exactly about this moment in history: “Good Riddance, But Now What?”

It goes like this:

Come, children, gather round my knee;
Something is about to be.
Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year.

For your reading pleasure, and with apologies to my guy Ogden, I have updated Nash’s poem for the looming transition from ‘23 to ‘24:

Almost, Dear Reader, we have passed
Like kidney stones these twelve months last.
Today’s December thirty-first:
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
The clocks sync up on our devices,
As we prepare to face the crisis.
Fuck! It’s midnight, Reader Dear—
Together, we’ll get through next year.

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In the third segment of Friday’s Five 8 New Year’s Special, we had a dance party. Chunk, our crack animator—and like Nash a comic genius—gave us this delightful video, featuring the dynamite cover of “I Feel Love” by my very talented wife, Stephanie St. John, and her virtuoso band, Mimi Ferocious:

In the segment, LB and I discussed great dance songs. Back in college, I used to DJ—or, rather, choose the songs to play—at our (frequent) parties, and it was always interesting to determine which tracks worked to keep everyone on their feet and which harshed the vibe.

In the wee hours of December 30—so, not long after the show—I woke up in the middle of the night with the chorus in my head of a song from 1994, an upbeat dance number called “Lucas With the Lid Off” that I hadn’t heard, or even thought about, in probably 20 years—a song I forgot existed. I owned the CD single but did not know until this morning that the eponymous Lucas Secon is the son of a prominent Danish painter and an American musician who is also, improbably, a co-founder of Pottery Barn. The song’s hip video was directed by the French filmmaker Michel Gondry, and appears not to be on YouTube.

“Lucas With the Lid Off” is one of the happiest songs of that rather bleak decade—it makes “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” sound lugubrious in comparison. Play this, and play it loud, and try to keep still:

I’m going to end the last “Sunday Pages” of 2023 by wishing you and yours a happy, healthy New Year, and by sharing the line from the Lucas song that popped, like a chilled bottle of Moët & Chandon, into my head in the middle of the night—repeating itself on a loop in my somnolent brain, as if a message from the universe. It’s both a hopeful mantra for 2024 and, appropriately for today, a lyric that pairs wonderfully with New Year’s Eve Champagne:

Whatever bubbles bubbles up.

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Photo credit: Los Angeles Daily News. Ogden Nash at Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, California, 1949.