Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) performing Where Do The Children Play?
Some films, especially coming of age films of either the political or social kind, do not age well. That is the fate of the early 1970s cult classic of sorts, Harold and Maude. This was a film that some friends of mine in Cambridge would queue up for on a weekly basis, and gladly, at one particular theater that played the film and only that film for about a year. See, that was the time of the great attempted late 1960s break-out (and extending through, roughly, the mid-1970s) from the confines of bourgeois society and the tracked career path by all kinds of people and teen angst and alienated Harold (played by Bud Cort) seemed a kindred spirit. And was then. Maude (played by Ruth Gordon), needless to say, was everybody’s grandmother dream, if only compared to harsh grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, don’t’ do this or that, and by the way your hair is too long, mother reality. And if you like slightly zany (no, not weird) little old ladies in tennis sneakers. And you should.
The premise of the film certainly had appeal, teen angst, big time teen angst by the distraught Harold trying to, against his stiff middle class background and his monster mother’s well-laid plans for his future, fight for his place in the world (or in the next world in his faux fascination with death and funerals) and old age angst (happy angst, if that is not an oxymoron) by the bubbly Maude. By the end of the film old Ruth is able to bring Bud around to seeing that life, his life, is worth living, and living, warts and all, aches and pains once gingerly shrugged off and all . Well, ho hum for that premise now, now that some of us are approaching old Maude’s age.
What is false here, maybe not as false as some things we have learned along the way in this wicked old world but false nevertheless, is Maude’s aged sage wisdom. The truth, the bitter truth, is that the wisdom we acquired was not done in old age but picked up in our youth and we have been living off that, chipping away at the edges, ever since. What still holds up, and holds well, is the sound track music of Cat Stevens’ (now Yusuf Islam) great songs like Wild World and Where Do The Children Play? Wordsworth had it right- “to be young was very heaven.”
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Where Do The Children Play? Lyrics
Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam)
Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, 'cause you can get anything.
I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?
Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off.
Oh, I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?
Well you've cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air.
But will you keep on building higher
'til there's no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?
I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?
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