Lyrics by Harold Rome: "Certain Individuals"

I should do a post -- indeed, someone should write a whole book -- about composer-lyricist Harold Rome, one of the best and least-appreciated of classic-era Broadway songwriters. He did many different types of shows, including big romantic musicals (his career sort of fizzled out over an ill-fated musicalization of Gone With the Wind), but his specialty was writing songs in his own New York Jewish vernacular; whereas other songwriters from the same background, he gravitated to subjects and songs that were directly connected to that background. And few lyricists have ever been as good at writing lyrics that really sound like a rhymed, heightened version of the way people really talk.

The lyrics I want to quote here are from the successful 1952 musical Wish You Were Here, based on Arthur Kober's play about the guests and staff at a Catskills resort. It's most famous as a show that had a swimming pool in the middle of the stage, and a show that became a hit through canny advertising despite almost uniformly negative reviews. The reviews may have had a point about the production, conceived by acclaimed but ham-handed producer/writer/director Joshua Logan. But Rome's score is one of his best, every number a funny, culturally-specific treat. My favorite song in the show is a throwaway, "Certain Individuals," sung by the second female lead and a chorus of women, teasing the heroine for being so obviously in love:

Certain individuals
Are walking on a rosy cloud,
And certain individuals
Are talking to themselves out loud.
Grinning like a birthday kid
With a brand-new toy,
Looking like Columbus did
When he said "Land ahoy!
(America!)"
Oh, oh, what we know
That we're not telling of,
About certain individuals
Fresh in -- pardon the expression -- love.

Certain individuals
Are feeling like a highness royal,
And certain individuals
Are reeling like they just struck oil.
Shining like a diamond pin
On a diamond chain,
Bubbling like the bubbles in
A glass of two cents plain.
(Or raspberry.)
Oh, oh, what we know
That we're not telling of,
About certain individuals
Fresh in -- pardon the expression -- love.

That's good lyric writing: simple yet cleverly rhymed, suggestive of everyday speech without being a carbon copy of it, full of specific images and fresh takes on familiar expressions.