How to Give a Serenade
Created | Updated Apr 14, 2019
How to Give a Serenade
Editor's Note: Once upon a time, children, Booth Tarkington was a famous writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice. I know: you've never heard of him. Sic transit gloria mundi, which is oddly the theme of his famous novel The Magnificent Ambersons. Orson Welles made a movie of this novel, but the studios ruined it with bad cuts and a happy ending. Welles was being snarky, anyway: Tarkington was in love with the past, and not in a good way. Here's an excerpt, so you can see if you'd like to read the rest. It's pretty interesting stuff if you want to know what people were like back in the late 19th Century.
These days, you don't serenade your gf: you send her Youtube links. Cheaper, and after all, if she doesn't like you, she doesn't have to click on them.
How to Drive Your Girlfriend Nuts: Hire a Band
'Keeping Open House' was a merry custom; it has gone, like the all-day picnic in the woods, and like that prettiest of all vanished customs, the serenade. When a lively girl visited the town she did not long go unserenaded, though a visitor was not indeed needed to excuse a serenade. Of a summer night, young men would bring an orchestra under a pretty girl's window – or, it might be, her father's, or that of an ailing maiden aunt – and flute, harp, fiddle, 'cello, cornet, and bass viol would presently release to the dulcet stars such melodies as sing through 'You'll Remember Me,' 'I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,' 'Silver Threads Among the Gold,' 'Kathleen Mavourneen,' or 'The Soldier's Farewell.'
They had other music to offer, too, for these were the happy days of 'Olivette' and 'The Macotte' and 'The Chimes of Normandy' and 'Girofle-Girofla' and 'Fra Diavola[sic]1.' Better than that, these were the days of 'Pinafore' and 'The Pirates of Penzance' and of 'Patience2.' This last was needed in the Midland town, as elsewhere, for the 'aesthetic movement' had reached thus far from London, and terrible things were being done to honest old furniture. Maidens sawed what-nots in two, and gilded the remains. They took the rockers from rocking-chairs and gilded the inadequate legs; they gilded the easels that supported the crayon portraits of their deceased uncles3. In the new spirit of art they sold old clocks for new, and threw wax flowers and wax fruit, and the protecting glass domes, out upon the trash-heap. They filled vases with peacock feathers, or cattails, or sumac, or sunflowers, and set the vases upon mantelpieces and marble-topped tables. They embroidered daisies (which they called 'marguerites') and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and owls and peacock feathers upon plush screens and upon heavy cushions, then strewed these cushions upon floors where fathers fell over them in the dark. In the teeth of sinful oratory, the daughters went on embroidering: they embroidered daisies and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and owls and peacock feathers upon 'throws' which they had the courage to drape upon horsehair sofas; they painted owls and daisies and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and peacock feathers upon tambourines. They hung Chinese umbrellas of paper to the chandeliers; they nailed paper fans to the walls. They 'studied' painting on china, these girls; they sang Tosti's new songs; they sometimes still practiced the old, genteel habit of lady-fainting, and were most charming of all when they drove forth, three or four in a basket phaeton, on a spring morning.
