For The Love Of...

It is a widely acknowledged trend in musicals that when the characters are at their most emotional, they will break into song. Whether you’re watching The Lion King or Team America, if the character is really mad, they sing a song, if they’re very upset, they sing a song, if they’ve just fallen in love…well they sing another song. Talking obviously does not suffice in these situations and so it is deemed necessary to have a whole new form of expression to get the point across. The music sweeps in and the cast begins to rhyme away as if they’ve been doing it since birth.

Now on the whole, I don’t actually have a problem with this state of affairs. I personally happen to like a lot of musicals and am all for being carried away in the moment. What I do have a problem with however is when this phenomenon of alternate forms of expression, spews over into real life with unfortunate consequences. Sometimes this becomes apparent as you walk past a busker on the street and occasionally it’s a little subtler than that. The average person doesn’t always have a tuneful guitar handy every time they feel like letting loose so what usually happens in these circumstances is just bad poetry.

Bad poetry I’m sure, could actually be classified as a form of torture. And this is a very roundabout way of saying that I now feel rather sorry for Bec Cartwright-Hewitts wedding reception guests. Granted, I am expressing a personal opinion here but I sincerely doubt I’m the only person who was slightly nauseated by her toast to her new husband. I’m sure someone else must have winced as she told everyone ‘Having a family with you makes me so glad / I know I’ll never get sad / Thanks so much for choosing me / By sticking together we’ll make a great family’.

Now normally I don’t take much notice of the young pregnant actress from Homely and Awful (sorry, that was Home and Away) but both she and the new hubby are (Australian) household names in their own right and as such, this toast made the news rounds. So I had to endure listening to it when I got to work one morning. I could have done without that. I know she was a newlywed and terribly in love with Lleyton, and really, it was a lovely gesture but ‘Rebecca Hewitt! I’m your wife! / Stick with me and you’ll have a bloody good life!’? At the risk of attracting negative attention to myself, I feel she does much better delivering lines she doesn’t write herself.

So maybe I’m not romantic enough. Maybe this sort of effort is totally wasted on me. Perhaps I don’t possess the finer sensibilities required to truly appreciate the sheer poetry of the piece in question or maybe I’m just up myself and think I could do better. Either way, I think its safe to say that if I get married, I won’t be using this speech as a kind of blueprint, its majesty to which I aspire. I also think that writing me love poems would probably not be the best way to my heart.