High Life | 27 September 2008

The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day.
They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken
the moon away.
It’s time to wind up the masquerade.
Just make your mind up, the piper must be
paid.

The party’s over, the candles flicker and dim.
You danced and dreamed through the night,
It seemed right just being with him.
Now you must wake up, all dreams must end.
Take off your make up, the party’s over,
It’s all over, my friend.  

Gstaad

The first time I heard this was back in 1956, and I was not yet 20, and it was at Merion Cricket Club, in Philadelphia, the first grass court tournament in America after Wimbledon. My host — players used to stay with club members in those innocent times — was a very good-looking tall gent and he was singing it drunkenly to his girlfriend, until his wife came down and there was a scene. (It was a big house in Philly’s chic quarter and my host had thought his wife to be asleep.) Later that year I saw The Bells are Ringing, the Broadway musical from which the song derives, and somehow, like many other tunes one hears at age 20, it has remained in my mind and in my psyche.

Actually, in today’s climate, you couldn’t make it up. It’s the perfect song for the Wall Street mess and then some. You’d think Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the wordsmiths, had the suckers in mind when they wrote it 52 years ago. ‘They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away. It’s time to wind up the masquerade… The party’s over…’ The trouble is the party’s not over, at least not for the pigs who are responsible for the mess. In fact it’s just beginning.