Dan Vilter

I just had one of those great learning experiences with my son yesterday
morning and would like to share.

This past week we have been working on a dance concert. I was designing the
lighting and Jocelyn was designing costumes. One of the pieces used the song
"We Didn't Start the Fire " by Billy Joel. It was not much of a dance, but
the soundtrack was intriguing. The piece had a live band. The first
rehearsal Jocelyn saw it was with just the band, nobody singing the lyrics.
This is this the song where Joel lists major events and people from the
fifties to the late '80s in rapid-fire. So without a singer and with pretty
ho-hum choreography, it was pretty dull. The next rehearsal Jocelyn saw was
with the singer and she found it far more interesting. She wasn't familiar
with the song so she did some research on the Internet and came up with
these two links.

http://www.springfield.k12.il.us/movie/fire.html

http://www.teacheroz.com/fire.htm

The first one is to a site some teachers in Springfield Illinois put
together. It contains a QuickTime video that flashes pictures of all the
events in rhythm to the lyrics. The second site lists all the lyrics and
has links in the lyrics to various sites that give you information on the
subject of the lyric.
So there I was watching this video, several times, and being amazed at much
more I was getting out of it each time I viewed it with the visuals. I was
looking at the linked site clicking on names I wasn't familiar with. I was
picking up facts about Santayana and a Prokhorov. Then my son Matthew
walked in. He had been to a rehearsal or two and had seen the dance. I
asked him if he'd seen the video and he said his mother had showed it to him
the day before. He asked what I was doing and I showed him the link site and
how cool it was to instantly go to information about the song lyrics. In a
flash he sat down next to me and we were quickly clicking to information
about Peyton Place and Princess Grace and Khrushchev and Dien Bien Phu and
Josef Stalin and Bernie Goetz. He particularly liked the the link to
Liberace and " crying all the way to the bank." We then discussed the
possibility of visiting the Liberace museum next time we were anywhere near
Las Vegas.

So there we were, reaching for an abbreviated history of the last half of
the 20th-century with a decade-old popular tune and a Web browser.
Jocelyn had a drive to learn more about this popular tune that she couldn't
believe she hadn't known about. I was captivated that adding the visual
element to the lyrics made them far more recognizable to me. Matthew was
impressed at the depth to each of the historical elements that were just
words in a song, and tickled at how quickly we had access to it all.

Then, in one of those grand coincidences, we were watching the Simpsons last
night and the tag to the clip show that was aired was a parody of this song!

This "always learning" talk makes so much sense.

-Dan Vilter

Karen

Dan, thanks for some great sites! I've already passed them on. Why did the
movie make me cry, though? (That's rhetorical, BTW!)

Karen
Saw Billy Joel in concert twice, '78, and '95 with Elton John: wonderful!



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