If a German wanted to stick something where the Sun don’t shine, all s/he would have to do is mail it here.  I swear every day this winter has been grey and often also rainy.  Spouse, who obsessively checks the weather forecast instead of sticking his nose outside, has been telling me every single day that tomorrow the sun and warmth will finally arrive.  Finally, two days ago, I broke and snapped, “Yeah, tomorrow, it’s always a day away,” which immediately shot me down a wormhole straight back to the late 1970s.

Annie.  As in, the musical.  It must have been the Frozen of its day.  For reasons unknown to me, someone (a grandmother? an aunt? probably my aunt) bought 7 or 8 year old me the LP of the Broadway show, which had its debut in 1977.  And I was hooked.  I must have tortured my parents, playing it over and over again on the living room stereo, singing along, belting out Tomorrow and It’s a Hard Knock Life in particular at the very top of my squeaky little lungs.

I had totally forgotten about that until that moment two days ago.  Yet I’d loved the songs so much, my parents, who could have used a Daddy Warbucks themselves, managed to scrounge up the funds for at least two tickets in the second to last row of the orchestra seating, off to the side, of what the internet tells must have been the Shubert Theater (although I’d swear up and down it was the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, but don’t ask me why, it’s not like if you showed me pictures of them, I’d be able to tell them apart).  All I remember of the show, aside from the stage being rather far away and one mental image of the moment I pushed the seat down and sat, with my jacket tucked under my arm, is being distinctly unimpressed when it was explained to me that the girl playing Annie was not the one on the record (i.e., she was not the right one), because she was now too old (which may or may not have been the case as it wasn’t exactly a million years later that the original run at this point).

So, it’s almost pandemic lock down survival music… the sun will come out, tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun… except that in the chorus, Annie really does sing, Tomorrow!  Tomorrow!  It’s always a day away….  Which is sort of exactly how life feels right now even though the governments of Europe are making public their “exit strategy” musings and plans for how to keep outbreaks under control while resuscitating the economy before the globe plunges into an Annie-style Great Depression.

But at least in real life, tomorrow finally came.  Today it was sunny!  And warm!!!  And in another week, if we’re lucky, the trees will have leaves again.