My Name Was Barbra, Too

Poor things; December since last we visited. Did you think I'd forgotten, abandoned you?

As I write I am listening to selections from Barbra Streisand's My Name Is Barbra, Two...Too? album, the sublime sequel, if that's the correct description, to her wonderful My Name Is Barbra album, which was, I think, the companion lp to the first of her storied sixties television specials--

Or actually, no, I may have the sequence slightly wrong. The black and white television special My Name Is Barbra may have been launched by the success of Streisand's record album of the same name, with the lp My Name Is Barbra Two...Too? the immediate follow-up to the TV special since it featured some of its tunes. (The Second Hand Rose medley in Bergdorf Goodmans department store.)

I was only 8 at the time of all this, understand, and the only television program I remember from that year was the Rogers and Hammerstein musical special, Cinderella, the color version starring the wide-eyed and winsome Lesley Ann Warren in the title role. If I squint I can see my skinny 8 year old self in summer culottes wandering my Aunt Mary and Uncle Larry's sprawling Blackstone Street apartment singing "A Lovely Night", channeling Lesley Ann swooning from that magical meeting with His Royal Highness, Stuart Damon.

But in just a few years it would be Streisand's "Where Is The Wonder" and "Second Hand Rose" I would be singing around the house, mine and everyone else's and I never really looked back. I loved the yearning and brass of that big, big voice.

More later. Not too much later. I promise.