Viva Las Vegas

Last night I fired up Napster and
searched for "Viva Las Vegas" (as sung by Elvis Presley). When I
searched on Elvis Presley, I found nothing. Those RIAA filters
are working overtime. So I searched on 'Viva Las Vegas' and got
tons of matches. I found one accredited to 'Elsiv Presley', and
downloaded it. Sure enough it was Elvis. Guess those filters aren't up
to snuff just yet.

Anyway, what prompted this sojourn was that I wanted to commemorate the
trip to Vegas by playing the song for Jean and Kelly. Maybe I'll buy the
album some day, but to be frank, I'm not that big an Elvis fan. If the
RIAA would get off their butts and sell songs online ala carte, I might
be interested, but they are a bunch of crooks and cheats, so I Napstered
this one (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling them crooks as I
download a bootleg of Elvis).

My memory betrayed me again, as I recalled the opening bars following a
sort of brisk samba pace, "dot dot Dot, dot da-Dot-da-da". But when I
actually played it, it was much livelier, almost manic,
"da-da-Da-da-da-Dadada", practically twice as fast as I'd remembered it.

I told Jean that I was downloading it, and she looked at me with a "are
you crazy" look while saying "okaaaaay." I asked what the big deal was,
and told her I just wanted to play the song for her and Kelly, and she
said "OH, the song! I thought you were downloading the MOVIE!" "There's
a movie?" I said. More cluelessness from Daddy Wakefield.

Today I drove Jean to see Dr. Ma, the opthalmic specialist she sees due
to her eye problems (no problems today, just a regular check-up, which
went okay). I had to drive because she was going to get her pupils
dilated enough to park an SUV in, and couldn't drive back home
herself. So after we returned, and before I went on to work, I played
the song for her. She agreed that it was pretty manic, and noted that
Ann-Margret was in the movie.

This is important mainly because Ann-Margret has a body of work in
musicals where she dances in the most frantic manner imaginable, and
Jean pointed out that this song would definitely kick that style into
overdrive. As I was leaving for work, she said that Ann-Margret was a
"hysterical seductress". I laughed nearly half-way to work.