{"id":28110,"date":"2026-01-05T18:00:59","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T23:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=28110"},"modified":"2026-01-05T18:27:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T23:27:45","slug":"a-recovered-childhood-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=28110","title":{"rendered":"A recovered childhood memory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I was a little kid, there was a recurring ad on television. The ad was for a collection of music you could send away for called &#8220;From Classics to Moderns.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In the ad, an older guy with a mustache showed up on screen and introduced various popular songs, and then revealed that the music for those songs was actually lifted from classical music. For example, the music for &#8220;I&#8217;m Always Chasing Rainbows&#8221; is actually straight up lifted from the &#8220;Fantaisie-Impromptu&#8221; by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin.<\/p>\n<p>My favorite moment was when the ad started playing the song &#8220;Stranger in Paradise&#8221; from the musical Kismet (one of my favorite melodies). At that point the man with the mustache would proclaim, rather dramatically, &#8220;But did you know that this is actually the &#8216;Polovtsian Dance Number Two&#8217; by Borodin?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>After I grew up, I totally forgot about that ad. But then something happened many years later, when I was in grad school.<\/p>\n<p>There was a review in our local newspaper for the Jim Jarmusch film &#8220;Stranger Than Paradise&#8221;. Except they got the title wrong, and printed it as &#8220;Stranger in Paradise&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The moment I read that, it all came back to me. I found myself proclaiming out loud, rather dramatically, &#8220;But did you know that this is actually the &#8216;Polovtsian Dance Number Two&#8217; by Borodin?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It felt ridiculous, but also oddly freeing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was a little kid, there was a recurring ad on television. The ad was for a collection of music you could send away for called &#8220;From Classics to Moderns.&#8221; In the ad, an older guy with a mustache showed up on screen and introduced various popular songs, and then revealed that the music &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=28110\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A recovered childhood memory&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28112,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28110\/revisions\/28112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}