Cinderella Returns

 

I've had a song from the 1957 television production of Cinderella playing in my head for most of the day. "Impossible things are happening every day," from the song named "Impossible." Rogers and Hammerstein wrote the musical for television. Only broadcast once, it was a live production, something that was the norm when I was growing up.

Periodically, my mother and I used to go in to New York City. We'd go for Broadway and off-Broadway shows, the Metropolitan Opera, the museums, and all the other wonderful things one could afford to do in the city in the 1950's and 60's.

Mom would usually buy me the musical sound track (on records in those days). She must have bought me Cinderella because a few night ago, I sat happily glued to the television, in the warm glow of happy memories, thinking how much Mom would have enjoyed watching this rebroadcast, the first one in fifty years. 

I say she must have bought the sound track because although it was only broadcast one time, I knew every song. By heart. Perfectly. Wow. Talk about long-term memory!

I listened to the sound track fifty years ago, and I still remember it so clearly.

We need to be careful of what we imprint on our minds. Fortunately for me, what I had imprinted that night fifty years ago watching television with my mother was a child's morality tale with wonderful music, each song more beautiful (or funny, like the "Stepsisters' Lament") than the previous one. The world today is sadly different from the one I grew up in. We need to be vigilant and choose those imprints carefully. We never know how long they will stay with us.