Merry Christmas To All…

No Christmas is complete without a nod to the (in)famous 1977 Bing Crosby holiday special featuring David Bowie. Their joint rendition of "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy" is the stuff of legend and probably did more to close the generation gap than a thousand encounter sessions.

The phony patter ("…I'm sure glad you came by to work on the pianer today…") between Der Bingle and the Androgynous One–then at the height of his Twiggy Stardust look–is priceless and, if I'm remembering correctly from the Gillespie family room, left both my parents and my siblings thinking that the world had indeed gone splendidly mad. Remember folks, this was manna from heaven in the age of Carter, Son of Sam, global cooling, and the inability of the Americans to win the Little League World Series. And that's not even dealing with the omnipresent threat of a conversion to the metric system.

But the real paydirt from the Crosby special, IMO, Bowie's rendition of "Heroes," which makes everyday feel a little more like Christmas.