A needed song for our times comes from another time: “Put On A Happy Face” from Bye Bye Birdie.
NOTE: OK, so we couldn’t get Dick Van Dyke — but in the You Tube below you can watch Steven and Sara Brattman lip syncing it:
And if the lyrics didn’t get through to you with that rendition, here are Gail Farrell, her husband Ron Anderson, and their friend Michael Redman singing it (with show stopping harmony) in a 1981 TV show:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.