Bing Crosby's White, Weird Christmas

Everyone dreams of a white Christmas. That is, until they are sitting in Logan Airport (as I am), enduring gate changes and flight delays.

But earlier this week I watched White Christmas (1954) for the first time, and zoned out a lot to think about snow. White Christmas has the most famous standard ever standard-ed, some Irving Berlin (including an homage to "Abraham"), and Vera-Ellen's freakish skinny legs, but I wondered if it was a classic for the right reasons.

Then Bing Crosby opened his mouth. Not to sing, though that's also worthwhile. But I'm convinced nobody has ever talked like Bing Crosby in White Christmas. Granted, I haven't seen all of Bing's ouerve. If his lines here are an accurate representation, though, Bing is the lovechild of Dashiell Hammett and Dr. Seuss.

Danny Kaye: I guess I just laid an egg.
Bing: An egg? Brother, you laid a Vermont volleyball!

Danny Kaye: I don't seem to have any cash.
Bing: Where'd you leave that? In your snood?

Does anyone still wear a snood? And when did Vermont reign supreme in the volleyball championships? Other classics:

I don't know what you see in this tall drink of charged water, but after you get to know him he's almost endurable. 

You're lucky! You might have been stuck with this weirdsmobile for life! 

The thing about Bing is that he was possibly the squarest man in America. Or so we remember him, with his pleasant boo-doo-doo baritone. But he also experimented with jazz and black music early in his career. Let's not forget that he crooned in blackface in five (!) movies. Uncomfortable now, no question, though I bet he felt some kind of musical hipness just by dressing up and getting down with it.

He's always playing himself, but it's a self that's always in character. He constantly dons roles within his films. But he's so genial and, I'll say it again, pleasant on the ears that those characters always seemed just like Bing. The Bing we could identify with. And so it's easy to overlook that he was an odd duck. Or that he tried very hard to be an odd duck. Even in Holiday Inn (1942), he was spitting out lines like "take a slug out of the mug."

Is he going for Tough Guy? Is he trying out Cool? Somehow, it makes my days merry that normal old Bing Crosby himself was a weirdsmobile.