LOUIS

By Raymond De Felitta -
Happy Birthday.

It's August 4th (this weekend), not July 4th as he claimed for so many years. The excellent Columbia University radio station, WKCR , will be playing hours of him this weekend.

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"TWO FAMILY HOUSE": WHO WAS THE REAL BUDDY VISALO?

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The main character in the film "Two Family House" (and our new musical "Buddy's Tavern") is a kind of mid-century, outerborough everyman named Buddy Visalo. Oddly, ever since I made the film, people have asked me if I "knew the real Buddy"--as if there was something about him and his story that couldn't have just been made up. And I always answer thusly: yes, I knew Buddy. He was my uncle. His name was Dan (birth name: Donato--meaning Donald, which he apparently didn't like) but always, familiarly, "Buddy". Or, to me, "Uncle Buddy". Buddy was an Italian-American, born in the Bronx and destined for a life of manual labor--my grandfather was a housepainter and early on he hired his second born (age 10? 12?) to be his assistant and helper. Never finishing school, Buddy kept working--doing construction, working in factories, doing woodwork etc. All the while he had an intense need to express himself artistically--in his case it ...
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An often-used theme in pop tunes of the past was the notion of a man (or woman) coming upon their lover in the arms of somebody else. And why not? It has everything--love, conflict, betrayal, heartbreak...and all stuffed snugly into thirty-two bars (the common length of most older songs--though Cole Porter and Harold Arlen each dared to defy this rule--Porter with "Night and Day" and "Begin the Beguine", Arlen with "That Old Black Magic", "The Man That Got Away" and God knows how many others. Enough!) In any event, it's the "holy shit, my sweetie's doing somebody else!" moment that we're concerned with here and below I've posted the lyrics as well as a Bing Crosby recording of my favorite example of this lost genre. "Two Cigarettes In the Dark", from 1934, was written by Paul Francis Webster (lyrics) and Lew Pollack (music) for a show called "Kill That Story" and was a solid, middle-brow hit in ...
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