As we've reached the night before Hanukkah, that means it's time for my annual tradition of my "New Tale of Hanukkah," along with the tale behind it.  

​Since it is now officially 12 days to Christmas, I figured what better time to post the song "12 Days to Christmas" from the musical, She Loves Me.  The show has a score by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, among others.

Rather than just post the audio of the song, this is a video of it, along with the last several minutes of the show.  It's comes from the Roundabout Theatre production in 1983 that starred Judy Kuhn and Boyd Gaines.

She Loves Me is based on the Hungarian play (and its subsequent Hollywood movie, Shop Around the Corner) which were the foundation of the movie You've Got Mail.  If you've seen any of those, you'll have a good idea of what's going on in the sequence here.  During the course of the song, the young man, Mr. Novak, tries to build up his relationship with Amelia Balish, with whom he had long been sniping, but only recently discovered has been his pen pal with who he's in love.  

The video jumps from this to the finale, when Miss Balish at last realizes he has long been her secret pen pal who she's in love with, as well.  (The line he sings, to prove who he is, "I am so sorry about last night," is the first line in the letter she wrote to her pen pal, apologizing for the screw-up when they were supposed to have met at a restaurant.)  And it all leads to a reprise of the wonderful song, "Ice Cream," with new lyrics for the final scene -- and then into the curtain call.
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And what the heck, it's 12 days to Christmas, so as a bonus lets go to "The 12 Days of Christmas."  Although, this is a bit of a different version.

Here are Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas from SCTV as 'Bob and Doug McKenzie' with their version of the classic song, on their “Great White North” album.

Okay, we have to put off the Holiday Fest for a moment and celebrate Dick Van Dyke on this 100th birthday.  Have could you even think of letting that moment pass.

I remember when I was a kidling, I sent my first "fan" letter to Disney Studios for the movie Mary Poppins.  I got a sort of disappointing postcard back, that was pretty much the cover art for the soundtrack album (and yes, I had the soundtrack album), so the card basically looked like this --

Still, I happily kept it for a long while.

Among all the many things I've seen Dick Van Dyke on film, I was pleased to see him perform in two shows on stage.  One was the two-person comedy, Same Time, Next Year, which he did with Carol Burnett.  Which isn't shabby.  It was wonderful and a joy.  The other was The Music Man, where he of course played 'Prof. Harold Hill'.  He was a total joy in that, as well, and the 1980 production was fun, and I'm so glad to have seen it -- although his interpretation of the role was as a good-old boy, just one of you all wheedling his way into the hearts of the townsfolk (which others actors have done, as well, including Matthew Broderick in a made-for-TV production), though my preference is when 'Harold Hill' is played as a slick-talking outsider con man.  That aside, I saw the show in Beverly Hills , and the production did so well that it toured and eventually went to Broadway.  Here's a 7-minute clip of that.  The quality isn't great, but how lucky it exists at all.

I never met the good fellow in person, though when I was working at Universal Studios and handling screenings for one of our Oscars Awards Night, he came.  He was sitting in the lobby and seemed to want to be left to himself, so I stayed away.

But for our celebration, here are three other videos.  This first is the very first episode, Season 1 from The Dick Van Dyke Show.
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Next, here is Dick Van Dyke in Bye Bye Birdie, the Broadway musical that brought him to fame and won him a Tony Award as Best Actor.  He, of course, recreated the role of 'Albert Peterson' in the movie, but this is the original theater staging of the famous song, "Put on a Happy Face," which he performed here on The Ed Sullivan Show.

And finally, we'll go out with the Oscar-winning Best Song he sang in Mary Poppins.  ​"Chim Chim Cher-ee."

Though I'm from Illinois, I grew up with a great many relatives in Indiana.  Including ten, among them my grandmother, within about a three block walk in Miller Beach, outside Gary.  We even had a family department store in Gary, H. Gordon & Sons.  (Harry Gordon was my mother's grandfather.)  I'd spend vacations there with my grandmother.  One of those cousins who I mentioned periodically here -- when we go out sailing on his small craft -- Jim Kaplan, is from that Indiana contingent.  So, although there's always a bit of a rivalry between the states, I've always felt a certain affinity with Indiana.  (In fact, I even was accepted at Indiana University for college, though as readers here long ago figured out, I leapt at attending the beloved Northwestern.  A good decision.)  Indiana is very conservative, and was a birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, but then it's also the home of Orville Redenbacher popcorn and the Indiana Dunes National Seashore.  And a lot of my family.  The Indiana state high school basketball tournament (yes, the foundation of the movie Hoosiers) was broadcast for years to the Chicago area, and I grew up watching it. So, I pay a lot of attention to the state.

​No more so than yesterday.

​Yesterday, the Indiana Senate voted 31-19 to reject a bill to gerrymander districts for the 2026 Mid-term elections.  This was something Trump had been heavily pushing.  He not only personally called lawmakers, he even sent “JD Vance” to Indiana to campaign for the bill – and wrote a long social media post the night before the vote.  Yet it was a crushing landslide defeat.  As the expression goes, Trump got owned.

The more important part of the story, though, is to note that MAGOPs have a 40-10 majority in the state's Senate.  Yet only 19 of those 40 members voted for the measure.  More than half went against Trump’s wishes – which were less like wishes and more like furious threats.

And what’s more important than even that is the vote result is almost certainly because MAGOP senators in the state see how disastrously Special Elections have gone for the party (losing 16 points on average – and, in fact, having two elections just this week flip from Deep Red to Democratic, the Miami mayoral race, electing its first Democrat in 28 years, a Georgia state Senate race where the district had gone for Trump by 12 points).  And seeing these results – including last week’s Special Election in Tennessee where a Deep Red district that had voted for Trump by 23 points lost 14 points – MAGOPs members don't want to put their Leans Red (or even Safe Red) seats in play.
 
The thing is, as important as this all is, it’s most important on a separate level than an electoral one, since (as I’ve written – and now have heard people far more expert than me) I think Democrats will pick up 30-40 seats in the Mid-Terms.  And even if MAGOPs did pick up two seats in Indiana, that would barely cut into that margin and wouldn’t stop Democrats from flipping control of the House.
 
The additional factor to consider, though, is what this overwhelming rebuke of Trump by his own party means for Trump’s ability to govern.  Without question, he still has a great deal of powerful authority in his job and within his party.  However, polls show that Trump’s support among MAGOPs has dropped by upwards of 15 points.  An AP-NORC poll showed that Trump’s support in his party dropped from 81% down to 68%.  And Indiana isn't the first Red state to refuse to gerrymander early -- it's the third.  Deep Red Kansas  has already decided not to, and so has New Hampshire.  As a result, one would think that since MAGOPs clearly do see how disastrously the Mid-Terms are shaping up for their party, that might impact how some of them (or eventually, perhaps many of them) deal with Trump – not just after the Mid-Terms when he is officially a lame duck, but already, just a year into his term.