Time Out from Thinking

In Manhattan's Blue Angel last week, the house lights dimmed and the M.C. announced the newest thing in the nightclub belt: a theoretical physicist who turns out tunes on the side. Tom Lehrer, tall, lean, 25, strode purposefully to the piano, peered into the crowd through horn-rimmed glasses, and launched into what Variety called "a comedy of terrors." He would, he said, sing an "ancient Irish ballad, written a few years ago." He turned to the keys, drummed out a melancholy accompaniment, and in a sardonic voice began to sing. Sample lyric:

About a maid I'll sing a song

Who didn't have her family long.

Not only did she do them wrong,

She did every one of them in, them in,

She did every one of them in.

For the next half-hour he sang his own ditties. Most of his songs gnawed and worried at a popular cliche until it was as grotesque as a Charles Addams cartoon. I Wanna Go Back to Dixie touted the sordid side of the Old South; a Love Song listed the discouraging aspects of senility. For the late show, the Lehrer lyrics got more gory and clinical, with a few interpretive asides by the entertainer (e.g., "The reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people"). When he finished, the audience happily howled for more.

There was no more--and there is no more, yet. Entertainer Lehrer has a repertory of just 14 songs suitable for public performance. A year ago he put twelve of them on a privately made LP, suddenly found himself swamped with orders.

Manhattan-born Tom Lehrer is not sure he wants to entertain any more, anyhow. He started, for reasons that are still unclear to him, while a Harvard undergraduate, and by the time he was a graduate student (in mathematics), found he was in demand. He kept pushing his material to see just how bloodthirsty he could get and get away with it. Now he knows, and with a brief taste of Manhattan night life in his mouth, he is ready to give it up. He would rather write ditties for others to sing.

An alumnus of the Atomic Energy Commission plant at Los Alamos, Lehrer has been on a brief leave from his defense job as "theoretical physicist, research mathematician, spectroscopist, or what have you" in Cambridge, Mass. Next week he is due back at his desk, where, says Lehrer, "I sit and think."

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