Okay, I’ve got two. One is just a repeat of many others’ “meeting someone you know in a weird place” stories, the other is downright freaky.
First: Shortly after leaving a job at one arts institution for another job at a different arts institution, I was sent on a business trip to Indianapolis, a software training conference. Since I don’t fly, I took the train, which had a two hour “layover” in Chicago. I’d never been to Chicago before and I figured, hey, I’ll go out and see whatever sights I can see in two hours. Unfortunately, it was only about 6:30AM, so not many places were open.
Anyway, I leave the train station to go for a walk, no map, no real destination, and the streets are almost eerily empty. I’m walking down this one street and I start feeling a little paranoid about walking in a completely strange city’s empty streets. Then I see someone walking toward me, a woman – the first person I’ve seen in Chicago since leaving the train station – and when she gets closer, I stop and almost shout: “Barbara?!!” Yes, it’s a woman I used to work with at my last job. She still worked at that job, but she was in town for some business reason.
The second coincidence is way better. Okay. So, I’m a major Anglophile, going way back. Starting in my college years, about 25 years ago, I began to recognize this one song that seemed to crop up in dozens of British films/TV shows. The only lines I ever remembered at the time were:
“And did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England’s mountains green…”
(Yeah, every British person knows what this is, and probably most Anglophiles do too.)
Mostly I knew it from several Monty Python episodes, but it also appeared in Chariots of Fire (appropriately enough as it turns out, as that’s part of the lyric) and even a short film in a Lenny Henry episode I watched on Bravo.
Anyway, I didn’t know what it was, and back then there wasn’t a WWW for me to do a quick lyric look-up of what this song was. But it became one of those things that nagged at me. What the hell was this song and why is it in every other British film/show? No one I knew could identify it.
So, in 1991, after graduating college, my friend and I moved to Manhattan. Like me, my friend was a singer, and we decided one day to go to Patelson’s, which was a very well-known music store (sadly no more). While she was browsing, I remembered this song again and thought I’d rummage around the old choral music bins (I was assuming it was a hymn) to see if I could find some old book of English church music. Nothing. Foiled.
Later, we left the store and were walking home. Several blocks into our walk, as we were crossing 57th and Fifth Avenue, I heard this woman several yards in front of us (she’d already reached the other side of the street) singing aloud to herself. Very loudly.
It was the song. She was singing the same damn song.
In utter shock, I dashed across the street, bolting away from my gobsmacked friend, to catch up with this stranger and ask her, “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you but I swear to God I was just trying to find the music to the song you’re singing. WHAT IS IT?”
“Jerusalem,” she said. “It’s a hymn, words by William Blake. Not sure of the composer, though. Perry something, I think?”
(Sir Hubert Parry, as I later found out.)
I’ve never before or since heard anyone singing that loudly on an NYC street, aside from buskers – not loudly enough for me to hear them from several yards away. And this is a relatively obscure song in the U.S., though as I said, every UK person knows it considering it’s basically an honorary National Anthem.
Bizarre. And hilarious.