“Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” Ethel Merman

Here’s a fun fact about me: in my teenage years, I would listen to Ethel Merman’s version of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” on the regular to cheer myself up when things were looking grim, which, let’s face it, was pretty much all the time during my (in retrospect not so grim) teenage years. I would also perform a lip-synched version for my mother when she was particularly down or stressed. I was pretty cool. It was some pretty cool daughtering, and some pretty cool twenty-first century teenagering. Anyway, all this is to say that I’m having a bad day: I got in a prolonged fight with an ancient copy machine; I had a story rejected; I lost my school ID. So I came home, paying for my bus ride with quarters in AGONY, agony quarters, thinking, “By God, I must listen to Ethel,” and so I turned on Ethel and no sooner had I done so than my school ID fell out of my pocket like a jerk. I’ll be swell, I’ll be great, gonna have the whole world on a plate.