"Baby, It's Cold Outside"

To me, something seems missing in all the Frank Loesser discussions.

It's this. Frank Loesser was a Pulitzer Prize-winning lyricist. He also had an Oscar. Sondheim--among many others--holds Loesser up as one of the greatest lyricists of all time. Loesser's masterwork--"Guys and Dolls"--is the stuff of Broadway legend, and it's been said that even a terrible high-school production can't run G-and-D's charms.

The thing that bothers me in the Loesser debates: Who ever said that Loesser was holding up his male and female speakers as exemplars of moral behavior? Who said that these two characters need to be taken as gods? Why are we meant to conclude that Loesser's writing "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is akin to an endorsement of everything the man and woman say in the song?

When people go down this fallacious road, it makes me think of "Macbeth." Should we stop producing "Macbeth" because some of the characters do things that aren't very nice? My head spins.

Loesser shows us people as they ARE, and not as they OUGHT TO BE. Shakespeare did that, too. And Chekhov. Maybe we shouldn't produce "The Seagull" anymore, because it might encourage people to go out and commit suicide.

Some other thoughts on "Baby, It's Cold Outside." A good writer is concerned with "the gap between speech and thought." You see that, in spades, in "Baby." The woman is of course protesting that "my brother will wait up," "I've got to go 'way," "my sister will be suspicious," "the town will talk": But her words are rather hollow. They're hollow because her actions are at odds with the thing she is saying. If she were fully on-board with what she herself was saying, she would simply stop talking; she would be out the door. (This is like a "Not to praise Caesar, but to bury him" situation.)

Another source of humor: The man has trouble saying, "I'd really like your company," so instead says, "The snow is up to your knees out there." This seems--to me, at least--to capture a simple and enduring human truth: We tend not to say the things that are actually on our minds.

If people dug into the Loesser catalogue for other hot-button moments, they would not need to dig for long. Consider the climax of "Guys and Dolls":

Marry the man today!
Give him the girlish laughter.
Marry the man today...
And save the FIST for after.

Or Sky's nervous ranting in the Second Act, as he recasts "Luck" as an alluring broad:

A lady wouldn't flirt with strangers.
She'd have a heart! She'd have a soul!
A lady wouldn't make little snake eyes at me....
When I've bet my LIFE on this roll!

Talk about controlling, macho behavior!

Or look at this distressing song title from Loesser's Pulitzer winner, "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying." You know the one I'm thinking of. "A Secretary Is Not a Toy."

If there's an upside to all the silly "Cold Outside" hand-wringing, it's that it gives us another chance to appreciate Loesser's sublime art. Here's a writer who understood how inherently foolish and comical we all are. The more serious we seem, the more laughable our actions. Loesser was not trying to give us an etiquette guide. He was simply documenting some home truths. He understood that there's often a two-tier quality to reality: there's the appearance (success in business) and then there's the underbelly (covertly sitting on your ass).

Just a thought. I look forward to the next "Guys and Dolls," which has a habit of reappearing on Broadway every ten or twelve years. The cream tends to rise to the top.

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