Reply To: 1st of may….!
Not bad, Angelastic, but it might suffer slightly from what Borba’d recognize as “for-a-small-fee-itis,” that is, coercing a lyric to fit into a line where the stresses don’t match up. Singing-wise, I’m a careful enunciator, because I can’t hold my pitches and so I want to make sure the lyrics, at least, aren’t mangled, but even so, trying your lines under my breath, I find myself slipping into “that man stance Shar-Pei”. My lazy American accent doesn’t like the short “a” of “tan” on an unstressed syllable — it inevitably gets schwa’d: “when we sing about thatten Shar-Pei.”
(The reference, of course, is to “America”, from West Side Story. Sondheim’s lyric “Everything’s free in America / For a small fee in America!” is immoderately clever, but the latter line is usually incomprehensible, since it doesn’t fit the music’s rhythm — “FOR-a-small FEE-in-Am ER-IC-A”, where the line really demands SMALL and FEE both to be stressed. Unrelatedly, I like the island Manhattan; smoke on your pipe and put that tan.)
[The pun I refer to above, by the way, is on “lay” as in “of the last minstrel,” or Old French lai if you prefer.]