What Do the Little Folk Do?

This is the title of a song from Camelot, the Broadway musical. In the original cast, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet sing this duet. Charming to witness this royal couple finding love and wondering what other people do in life. So they sing about it and think of themselves, of course, as royal and elite. Everyone else are the ‘little folk’ and they wonder what they do?


This is a favorite ditty in my memory. I saw Goulet in the role on Broadway way back when, but not Julie Andrews. That song and its light, airy melody comes back to me often in the shower. A good way to awaken the vocal chords!


The song, however, is a reminder that differences among us – whether of class, wealth, education, birth, nationality – do not lessen us. We live, love and laugh. All of us. Some more often than others, but life is filled with wonders whether rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, smart or dumb.


Truth be told, the little folk are all of us. What we do is the duty we accept day by day, moment by moment. Currently, we folks man the cash registers, cook the meals, swab the restaurant floor, vacuum public carpeting, run the hotels, the schools, the businesses, and what all else. We research, operate laboratories, engineer new gadgets and whole technologies. We test them and teach others about them. We help society adapt to new things – ways of doing things, thinking and behaving.

We live with problems and find solutions to them. We help new generations understand their new circumstances and how to adapt to them well enough to evolve a better template for them to use in the future; and subsequent generations as well.


We experiment with art forms. We write plays and movie scripts. We envision story lines and character roles. We even act in those roles and bring them to life for others to experience. In doing so, we expand the experience of discovery of ideas and follow-on conclusions. We feel. Sense. And better understand what is difficult to put into words.


We play instruments, not because they are there, but because they become a voice of our inner selves. We now can express ourselves in manners unimagined before. Even recreating the music of Mozart or Beethoven, or Bach or thousands of other geniuses. We are able to feel and wonder at the intellectual process that created the music. Not just the notes or the tempo; but of the sounds, the chords, the blending of instrumental voices. The vibrations and nuance of emotions are present. Glorious. Mysterious. Experienced so as to discover more.


We little folk think. We organize our households, our businesses, our social interactions, and our reading and understanding of our universe however large or small. It is a personal life that thrusts dimensions outward and large.


The elites are little folk, too. They decide and cause things to happen. But someone must do what follows. That is for the rest of us. Our roles are varied and often unwritten. We create the answers to all that happens. We live the details.


In all of that we live, love and laugh. Just like Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.  


Imagine.


November 29, 2019