Playlist for Sunday, January 22, 2017:While do I feel like Madonna when I say "Like An Icon"?

Well, the Heat Wave Fantasy of last week didn't have much effect. Although NOW the weather is toying with me. Here, take that...too warm? How 'bout some rain? (Raining In My Heart? Rain On The Roof? The Rain In Spain?) Black ice? (Ok, I got nothing there.) No worries, plenty in my bag of tricks. So maybe I should shut up already and quit tempting fate.

So it's back to Classics. Iconic stuff. You know, back 3,000 years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth and I was tutoring SAT Verbal sections to Brooklyn public schoolers, NO ONE KNEW what an icon was. I had to tell 'em to think about the inside of St. Patrick's and all those statues with the cute little candles. Well, now EVERYBODY knows icons, just not the prayerful kinds. (Just click on the icon, Mom! Really?) But Iconic...having the traits of an icon? That might still slay those Park Slope sophomores.

Dick Gautier, the first Conrad Birdie, passed away last week, so we'll haul out Bye Bye (to say Bye Bye). Conway Twitty was (in those days) an Elvis Presley rival...hence the name. Well, Dick at first refused to audition for the part. He preferred Sinatra and Como standards (which he was singing in his nightclub act at the time). Didn't know any Elvis tunes to audition with. Still, he had that hair. So eventually he came around...talk about playing an icon! And then he got down off the icon...shelf...and went on to do some questionable 70s TV, and then became a pretty decent caricaturist. Iconic no longer. Go figure.

So icons. Vivian, Stubby, Madeline, Dolores. Carol, Chita, Betty and Adolph. We could pray to those icons. The icons of Broadway. Click!


Overture (Instrumental, Bye Bye Birdie)
The Telephone Hour (Ensemble, Bye Bye Birdie)
Spanish Rose (Chita Rivera, Bye Bye Birdie)
A Lot Of Livin' To Do (Dick Gautier, Bye Bye Birdie)
The Oldest Established (Sam Levene, Johnny Silver, Stubby Kaye, 
      Guys And Dolls)
Take Back Your Mink (Vivian Blaine, The Hot Box Girls, Guys And Dolls)
If I Were A Bell (Isabel Bigley, Guys And Dolls)
Sit Down, You're Rockin' The Boat (Stubby Kaye, Guys And Dolls)
Raining In My Heart (Bernadette Peters, Dames At Sea)
Rain On The Roof (Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Follies)
Little Drops Of Rain (Judy Garland, Gay Purree)
Soon It's Gonna Rain (Rita Gardner, Kenneth Nelson, The Fantasticks)
The Rain In Spain (Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Robert Coote, My Fair Lady)
Now You Know (Leslie Kritzer, Vanessa Williams, Erin Mackay, Barbara Cook,
      Merrily We Roll Along)
Every Day A Little Death (Patricia Elliot, Victoria Mallory, A Little Night
      Music)
Barcelona (Dean Jones, Susan Browning, Company)
Buddy's Blues (Mandy Patinkin, Follies)
The Column (John Lithgow, The Sweet Smell Of Success)
One Track Mind (Bryan d'Arcy James, The Sweet Smell Of Success)
Everything's Great (Kevin Tobey, Paula Wayne, Golden Boy)
While The City Sleeps (Billy Daniels, Golden Boy)
If You Hadn't, But You Did (Dolores Gray, Two On The Aisle)
Wherever He Ain't (Bernadette Peters, Mack & Mabel)
Never (Madeline Kahn, George Coe, Dean Dittman, On The Twentieth 
      Century)
After You've Gone (Leland Palmer, All That Jazz)
Still Hurting (Sherie Rene Scott, The Last Five Years)
Happily Ever After (Carol Burnett, Once Upon A Mattress)
Dahlia Whitney/A Perfectly Lovely Surprise (Murder For Two)
He Did It (Karen Ziemba, Ensemble, Curtains)
Long As I'm Here With You (Sheryl Lee Ralph, Thoroughly Modern Millie)
They Don't Know (Harriet Sansom Harris, Thoroughly Modern Millie)
Not For The Life Of Me/Thoroughly Modern Millie (Sutton Foster, Thoroughly
      Modern Millie)