THE SQUARE OF THE HYPOTENEUSE by Danny Kaye (from the film “Merry Andrew”, 1958)

Danny Kaye resembled my uncle Teddy, dad’s older brother, the middle of three fatherless products of the depression. (My father told me he never tasted ice cream until he was a teenager). Whenever Uncle Teddy came over he gave me gifts or money, and he was always laughing. In fact, that was his response to any rebuke: gales of high-pitched giggles, sent lilting aloft, from his thrown back head.  A bachelor until after he retired because he lived with and looked after my grandmother, Anna, who lived well into her nineties, Teddy was an accountant for the City of New York, who, immediately upon retirement, moved to Costa Rica, married a woman 30 years younger, and lived like a king until his death, also in his mid-nineties. 

I couldn’t get enough of the ebullient Danny Kaye (nee Kaminski), whose screen presence always delighted me. He seemed like a child himself, and so many of his films play like fairy tales. In the movie Merry Andrew, from which this ditty derives, Danny is an irrepressible teacher in an uptight boarding school, who here is giving a musical math lesson to his pupils. And, it stuck with me. Trigonometry was the only math class I could abide. I think Oliver Sacks, Pete Seeger, or the Muppets could probably tell you why music is such an effective pedagogical tool. Marry an important phrase to a catchy melody and you can create a life-long memory. Danny delivered a bunch of those to my generation.