If I were a rich man....

When I was a kid, my father would more often than not be singing some song or other under his breath. Sometimes it was a country tune, other times a popular standard, and most often it was a show tune of some sort. And as I suspect many people's fathers did when they were wandering around singing in accompaniment to their own daily stuff, my father maintained a pretty loose relationship with the lyrics, freely substituting a liberal helping of "dooby doobies" and "la dee dum dee dum dum doo's" whenever the actual poetry of Messrs. Lerner or Hammerstein or Gershwin or Berlin or Cash or whomever slipped his mind.

One example that I remember being very consistent was his singing of "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof, which he would sing-and-improvise thusly:

If I were a rich man,
Yaha-deeuh-deeuh-deeuh-deeuh-deeuh-deeuh-dum,
All day long I'd biddy-biddy-bum,
If I were a wealthy man.

Except, well, I actually watched the film of Fiddler on the Roof a year or so ago and discovered that the actual lyrics of If I Were A Rich Man go thusly:

If I were a rich man,
Yaha-deeuh-deeuh-deeuh-deeuh-deeuh-deeuh-dum,
All day long I'd biddy-biddy-bum,
If I were a wealthy man.

So my father wasn't covering a faulty memory of lyrics at all. Go figure.

All this is, of course, an introduction to a blog-meme with which I have been tagged by Paul of Aurora Walking Vacation. It goes like this: you take the following list of prompts and pick five of them to "complete". Here's the list:

If I could be a musician...
If I could be a farmer...
If I could be a psychologist...
If I could be a lawyer...
If I could be a missionary...
If I could be a gardener...
If I could be a painter...
If I could be an architect...
If I could be a doctor...
If I could be a linguist...
If I could be a writer...
If I could be a professor...
If I could be an athlete...
If I could be a justice on any court in the world...
If I could be a world famous blogger...
If I could be married to any current world politician...
If I could be a scientist...
If I could be an actor...
If I could be a chef...
If I could be an innkeeper...
If I could be an agent...

And my five are as follows:

1. If I could be a musician I'd be a classical musician. But what kind?

I always wanted to be either a trumpet player in a symphony orchestra, or a conductor. I was never that interested in being a trumpet soloist; to me, the grandest musical thrill was the teamwork involved in pulling together a massive work and making it into a cohesive, emotionally satisfying work. If your band or orchestra is rehearsing well, there's a moment when you suddenly realize, "My God, it's all shaping up", when you suddenly realize you're listening to the entire work as opposed to your own part or the parts of those around you.

But to be a conductor, well, then you're the one responsible for seeing that all these musicians under your baton get to that point. And you have to have the vision to know what the entire work is going to sound like all along, and the knowledge of all those disparate parts to get them all to work together.

As a conductor, most of all, I would have a pulpit from which to champion the music I love most. There'd be Berlioz and film music concerts galore!

2. If I could be a farmer I'd probably be a cattle rancher as opposed to an actual farmer. I think it would be cool to own a herd of buffalo. Or maybe I'd raise alpacas. I'd be more attuned to caring for animals than for cultivating crops, I suspect. And of course, if I were to become a farmer, I'd be able to dress the part already, right? Heh!

3. If I could be an architect I would try to design buildings not as gigantic de facto sculptures but as buildings, like Louis Sullivan used to do. I'd make the classic architecture of Buffalo as my guide, and I would stay in Buffalo and fight tooth and nail to make this a walkable city once again. I'd design buildings that come to the sidewalk, buildings of materials available locally and able to be built by local construction firms. I wouldn't build anything that disrupts street patterns and I wouldn't build a single damn parking lot that looked like a parking lot. I'd conceal them within actual buildings, like they do in Toronto.

4. If I could be a writer I would...wait a minute. Who says I'm not a writer? If I were a writer by trade, as opposed to just being a writer by calling myself one, I would write the stuff that I'm already writing. So I guess that's a pretty boring answer.

5. If I could be a scientist I would study the human brain, in hopes of discovering a way to regenerate damaged brain tissue. My reasons for this are, I suspect, obvious to anyone familiar with the contents of this blog.

OK, now's apparently when I "tag" three other bloggers to do this thing, so I'll go with Sean (who I'm sure will find some way to mention his new-found wish to be waterboy for the New England Stupid Patriots into it somehow), Darth Swank (whom I'd personally like to see answer with the "If I could be an innkeeper" entry, since I bet his inn would include some kind of Asian pop-culture decor in every room), and Craig of the North Coast (just to tag someone local).