Homework: Guilty Pleasure

One of my long-time guilty pleasures has been HEARTBEATS, a sort of jukebox musical of Amanda "The Rose" McBroom's cabaret songs (plus a few presumably written for the show).  The thin story focuses on a woman turning 40 and wondering what went wrong with her marriage.  For some reason, the show and its 90s lite pop score really resonated with me when I was in the 7th grade.  I got the cast recording.  The L.A. cast recording.  I don't know how one got the L.A. cast recording of HEARTBEATS 40 minutes west of Cleveland in 1996, but by gum, I found a way. 

My favorite song had always been "Putting Things Away", a song which finds parallels in putting away groceries and dreams.  The lyric is a bit on the nose and the music cheesey, but I love this song:

   

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In trying to find some mention of it on the internet, I found this most peculiar item--an assignment for an ESL class at the National Taiwan University.  Most of the assignment is about identifying the many household items and activities mentioned in the song--it really is a esl vocab paradise.  But the last study question--"What explanation in the second part of the song does the singer give for not liking to put things away? How do the last things she says in the song affect the interpretation of the rest of the song?"--would actually be difficult for me to answer.  How DOES the end of the song affect your interpretation of the beginning.  Because you don't want to play the ending of the song, but yet...and I remember why I got out of performing.  


One last tidbit: whilst at amazon looking for a jpeg of the cast recording I found this review I wrote while a Jr. in High School (I wrote a lot of amazon reviews back then).