Fiddler from the Past

I bring you a thorough distraction from what I'm supposed to be writing, in order to tell you of a very long-winded coincidence. 

One year my middle school put on the play Fiddler on the Roof. I tried out for it. Probably the first and only time I did so. I would have been out of town for one of the performances. That's definitely why I didn't get picked - not because of my lack of acting talent. 

O__O

(I actually have no idea how good my audition was, or how good I was at singing back then). 

Anyway, I must have seen the Fiddler on the Roof film before my school announced the play. I definitely saw it a few times. And a long time ago, probably a few years after my failed tryout, I bought Tradition off of iTunes. I thought I was buying the version from the film. It wasn't from the film. That didn't stop me from listening to it many times. But somewhere along the way, the song vanished from my computer music collection. So I haven't listened to it in some years. Nor have I seen the movie in a long while. 

Fast forward to the last few days, when I got distracted by watching some freaking awesome videos about making the Wicked movie. And the scene from Spiderman No Way Home where Dr. Octavius attacks Peter. Youtube suggested a video about filming Spiderman 2. Dr. Octavius's actor is in his full villain outfit, including the arms. I was thrilled to discover that those arms are sometimes real - not only cg. And they're moved by puppeteers. Puppet robot arms! I love it (maybe because Dad and I have been watching some of the old Muppet Show episodes, which are a lot of fun). Man, that must be an awkward rig to be strapped to, but I love when things are real. Cg can do amazing things, but real is just so... real, you know? All this is to say, actor Alfred Molina is ready to film the next scene. But he pauses to sing "If I were a Rich Man," from Fiddler on the Roof. Complete with the mechanical arms clacking in time to the beat. 

About a week before, I had just seen a completely unrelated video featuring the exact same song. An interesting coincidence. I want to watch the movie again. But I also never knew that Alfred Molina sings. When I found out in high school that Hugh Jackman sings, I was blown out of the water. I listened to his version of Oklahoma so many times - that was long before The Greatest Showman existed. I wonder how I would have reacted back then if I realized that both Wolverine and Dr. Octavius sang.

Last night, I found Alfred Molina's version of Fiddler on the Roof on Youtube. Not great video quality - so I guess it was sneakily taken by someone in the audience. The video was blurry, but it was fun to hear the songs again. I was amazed at how well I remembered some of them. 

Something about their version of Tradition caught my attention. I made a mental note to look into it.

Just now, I pulled out my stack of old CDs. I have a massive music collection. I've gone to great lengths to find some songs. And I continue to burn my music collections onto CDs, because I have had many close calls with the music on my computer. For example, when I've gotten a new computer, and a number of the songs wouldn't transfer over. For some reason, every now and then a song stops working. And some songs from iTunes that I've bought and show up on my purchase history will not load onto my computer, or laptop, or phone. Even an employee couldn't figure it out. Maybe that's how Tradition fell off of my computer. So yes, I keep CDs of all my music because I've had to rely on them many times to recover songs that have somehow self-destructed. I was confident that the Tradition song I'd bought as a teenager was still on one of those CDs. It was (thankfully on one of the first CDs I looked at - they're labeled pretty well XD )

I plugged in my disk reader and loaded the CD onto my computer. None of the songs were labeled, which is always annoying, but for some reason that often happens on burned CDs. It's like the computer remembers the names, but the CD itself doesn't remember them. I kept telling myself that of all the versions of Tradition available on iTunes, it was highly unlikely to be the same version I had just listened to. But for some reason at the last second, I decided that it must be the same version. I clicked play. And the version of Tradition I listened to all those times was the version that Alfred Molina sang. 

I guess I'll take this opportunity to put Tradition back on my computer. It's clearly a very determined song.