A Thousand Friends

I have had, and may have still, a thousand friends, as they are called, in life, who are like one's partners in the waltz of this world – not much remembered when the ball is over, though very pleasant for the time.

– Lord Byron (from a letter to Mary Shelley, 1822)

                                                                       

Lord Byron

This is my thousandth blog post, a tribute
to the amount of nonsense I can cough up
when self-challenged. I like Lord Byron’s
view of his thousand friends, but I took
a different approach in a song lyric I wrote
for the musical Beasley’s Christmas Party,
an adaptation composer Tom Savoy and I
are continuing to carve out of an old
Booth Tarkington novel. This is a song sung by
young Hamilton Swift, and it makes much more
sense when set to its music:


Look around you here,
You can see them now,
Like a fairy tale come true.

You’re surrounded here
By a thousand friends,
With a hundred thousand pleasures to pursue!

Ask them to dance with you,
Watch how they twirl and jump and glide;
One thousand smiles for you,
Two thousand arms that open wide.

And when you need a friend to cry to,
Or a place where I can try to hide,
I will find that place
With my thousand friends,
And those thousand friends begin with you!

– from Beasley’s Christmas Party, music by Tom Savoy, as yet unproduced.