One more Dactyl (and Remembering the Nordstrom Girls)

It just struck me that this dactyl-hymnal thing might be more prevalent than I had realized (link). Now I am remembering what was, for me, the funniest amateur vaudeville act I ever enjoyed. That would be:

Soft as the voice of an angel,
Breathing a lesson unheard,
Hope with a gentle persuasion
Whispers her comforting word:

Yep, that would be "Whispering Hope, (link), the work of one Septimus Winner who gave us also such winners as “Listen to the Mockingbird,” and “Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?” But you just don’t know what comedy is unless you heard "Whispering Hope" as rendered on home theatricals night in the 1940s by my mother, Esther Nordstrom, and her sister, Louise Nordstrom.

I guess you had to have been there and sadly, this was the day before tape recorders, but I can still picture them—both short, Esther roundish and Louise a bit spidery, arm and arm they’d enter; they’d bow in unison. Then totally deapan, in close harmony:

SOFT

As the voice of an a-a-ngel,

BREATH

Ing a lesson unheard

And so forth through –well, I don’t know how many verses, I was laughing too hard and so, I assume was everybody else in reach. They’d bow again, still unsmiling and exit as they entered. Like I say you had to have been there. But I also say: Esther’s been dead for over 20 years now—Louise, longer. There are many reasons to wish them with us again, but I can think of none more compelling than the desire once again to hear them do their rendition of “Whispering Hope.”

Church Music Footnote: Only remotely relevant, Mrs. Buce asks: is “Ave Maria” really the most god-awful piece of music Schubert ever wrote, or is it just that it is so consistently sung god-awfully by god-awful singers? Or maybe they are joking and we don’t get it.

Update: My sister Sally and my cousin David independently remind me that there was a third Nordstrom sister in the act: our aunt Selma. I never saw that version, but I can believe it: Selma, the youngest of the three (and the only one who never married), shared her sister's comic sensibility, although she was perhaps a bit gentler. Sally also points out that they all three had absolutely knockdown perfect pitch which, in this case, was part of the comedy.