I'm singin' out, sistahs!

Thanks to MGM, my family history is totally getting done. Well, in oral form. My husband caught the family history bug a couple of months ago and spends his Sundays tracing family lines and emailing with distant cousins he's never met about long-dead cousins none of them ever knew. He has a lot of fun with and it's fun for me to see.


Now, I come from a line of avid genealogists on my dad's side. You know the kind. (They have a wink and a handshake deal with their local Catholic diocese to dig around in their records whenever they want. They wrote a book. There are boxes of pedigree charts.) That kind.


I do family history stuff, too. I just uh . . . well, I have a slightly different approach. On Sundays lately, we've been watching old musicals. Singin' in the Rain, The Music Man, Mary Poppins. And as we watch them, I tell my boys stories about growing up watching the same movies with my parents. They died a couple of years ago, so my oldest remembers them well but my youngest never knew them. I tell them about how Singin' in the Rain was my dad's favorite movie of all time. He checked out a book from the library about it when I was a kid and I learned all kinds of trivia about it each time we watched it together. Which was a lot, by the way. I saw that movie more than any other in my childhood. Did you know that Gene Kelly's famous scene where he actually performs "Singin' in the Rain" was performed in one take because he was running a fever of 103 and knew he had to nail on the first shot? Or that the rain in that scene is actually water mixed with milk so it would show up better on film? I know what seem like a million tidbits like that from my dad and I share them bit by bit as I watch it time again with my sons, same as he did with me.


I tell them about how Uncle Jamie always cracked up during "Make 'Em Laugh" and how we both loved the "Moses" song. And how my dad always kind of thought Donald O'Connor was a better dancer than Gene Kelly.


When I finally get my hands on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, I'll tell them how my girlfriends all wanted to marry Benjamin and how we would laugh ourselves silly at whoever had to play Dorcas when we re-enacted the movie.


I tell them how the very first tape my brother ever bought was the soundtrack for The Music Man and that we used to perform the "Shapoopie" song with my cousins because we thought it was so funny.


I know it's not on a flash drive somewhere or printed out to hand down to my great-great-grandkids, but my children are learning important lessons about where they come from.


And I totally have to get West Side Story. My oldest is going to love Officer Krupke. I did, when I was a kid, because my parents made sure I saw it and my kids will see it too.