Tired of hearing about Sinatra? No, I didn't think so.
Like most baby boomers, I heard him many times before I ever really listened to him. That moment came on a winter's night in Warsaw, Poland, at the English Language College where I was teaching. I had obtained for my advanced classes a cassette of one-minute vignettes that consisted not of conversations but of sounds. The students were to listen to each vignette and then construct a story about what they thought was happening in it.
The first vignette started with the sound of splashing water - someone taking a bath, perhaps? - followed by the voice of Sinatra. "All, or nothing at all," he sang. "Half a love never appealed to me." The song was drowned out by other sounds, which I've since forgotten, not surprisingly. Those two lines, coming as if out of nowhere in that Polish classroom, had a mesmerizing effect on me. I played the vignette again, and again; more times than my students needed to hear it in order to dream up a story. But I needed to hear it. The voice was not that of the jaunty, cocky Sinatra; it was of a serious, yearning, yet still self-assured Sinatra, and it transported me to America in a way that no magazine or letter from home could.
I have been listening to Sinatra ever since.
