Last Saturday, Chris and I had a chance to go to two outdoor events here in Tübingen that, oddly enough, wound up having something American in common.

Let me explain.

In the morning we checked out a semi-annual city-wide flea market, with rows upon rows of tables filled with stuff that people wanted to get rid of. One family was getting rid of a bunch of board games, and sitting there on the end of the table was a box with a game called Route 66.

Yes, that Route 66. There was even a little play on the old song refrain on the cover of the cover:

Get your kicks
durch Taktik & Tricks (“through tactics and scheming”)
on Route 66

I should note that “Tricks”  may first appear, to an English speaker, to be a reference to the idea of taking tricks in a card game. But in fact, in German, that kind of “trick” is called der Stich. In the Route 66 game, the “Tricks”  referred to on the cover are the scheming and conniving you need to do during the play; for example, you might want to trick your opponent into speeding and getting a speeding ticket.

Anyway, I took a closer look at the box,  and noticed that it said that the cards have photos taken by the German designer of the game, Wolfgang Riedesser. Which implied to me that this must not be an American game originally, but rather a game developed in Germany. Intriguing – I took a moment to wonder if there’s an American card game about the German Autobahn.

At that point, the seller came over and pointed out that the game, while it had been opened, had never been played with. The cards were still in their original plastic wrappings, and the motorcycle lapel pin (a bonus gift!) was also still in the box.  As I stood trying to decide how much to offer for it, the woman volunteered that the price was 1 euro, or about $1.50.

1 euro? Sold!

On the internet yesterday, I discovered that Wolfgang Riedesser not only designed this game, but also several other ones. A page with a brief description of his work is titled The Genius that is Wolfgang Riedesser; he’s clearly got at least one big fan, eh?  His Route 66 game was published in 1993, which makes it one of his later works as it turns out.

On that fan page you’ll also see that there are actually 2 different versions of Riedesser’s Route 66 game. Something to be on the look out for at the next flea market, I guess.  I don’t see any English language version of his game listed anywhere, though. On Amazon there is a card game listed called Route 66, but it seems to be something completely different from Riedesser’s masterwork.

Anyway, the German game was a fun find, even if I would up with the refrain from the old Route 66 song running through my head all morning. We still haven’t had a chance to sit down and try to play it, but at 1 euro, I definitely got my money’s worth just to check out the cards and photos.

Anyway, Saturday afternoon I finally got that song out of my head as strains of music from various musical group performances filtered through the windows of our apartment. The performances were part of the Tübingen City Festival. As you might recall, there was a bicyclist from Ireland at the festival’s opening last Friday who gave gifts to the mayor of Tübingen, and he had said at the time that he was part of an Irish singing group. Chris and I wound hearing that group’s whole performance without leaving our apartment, as the temporary stage where they performed was set up just down the street from us. Nice.

Later that evening we set out to discover what other musical acts we could find at the festival.  As we wandered around, one thing that was striking was how many German groups were playing American songs at the festival. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted we’d hear anyone singing (in English) Take Me Home, Country Roads. But we did.

And then we came upon a group that was just getting ready for their set on the temporary stage set up on the steps of the Stiftskirche, that church I mentioned in yesterday’s post. As the group launched into their first number, it slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t having flashbacks to the morning — the group really was singing the song, Route 66. Now, they were singing it as a rock-and-roll song, instead of the original jazz version which made it nearly unrecognizable to me since I didn’t know it had been recorded as a rock and roll song (by the Rolling Stones, as it turns out).

But the final line of the first verse was unmistakable, “Get your kicks on route sixty-six.”

I ask you — what were the odds? I hadn’t thought about Route 66 in years, and then here it was, mentioned twice in the same day in Tübingen, Germany.

Luckily, this second mention didn’t lead to the song staying in my head for hours, though. Listening to that singer, as well as some of the other singers at the festival who sang in English, I realized that there’s a market for a tutor to work with these folks on how to pronounce quirks in English lyrics. For example, consider the words to the middle part in the Route 66 song:

Now you go through St. Louis
Joplin, Missouri,
And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty….

St. Louis there needs to be sung as “saint louey”, not “saint louis”, so that it rhymes with “missourey”.  That line gets repeated a few times on the song, and each time the singer sang “Saint Louis”  I wanted to rush over and hand him a my business card:

Dr. L. L. McIntyre
American Lyrics Tutor
Specializing in teaching you the tricks to pronouncing all the words in
American jazz, pop and Broadway standards
Reasonable Rates
References upon request

OK,  I don’t carry cards like that. But I could. The “references upon request” line is  true: in exchange for help with my Italian, I did actually do exactly this for a friend in Bolzano, who sang professionally with a couple of groups.

So maybe I should get some cards printed up like that. Then, at the next festival, I’ll be ready to offer my card to wayward singers who need to know how to rhyme St. Louis with Missouri, and whatever else comes up as a lyrical challenge.

The thought of going around and handing out specialized business cards triggered a memory of the opening scene from the movie Hello Dolly, where Barbra Streisand – as Dolly Levy – goes around and hands out business cards that are customized for any eventuality: matchmaker, and a whole range of other services. Called Just Leave Everything to Me, it’s a song that was written by Jerry Herman, the original composer of the musical Hello Dolly, but it was written specifically for Barbra Streisand to sing in the movie. I mention that fact, because when I went to find a clip of the song for the post, I ran across an unexpected problem. Hello Dolly is a staple of high school musical productions, judging from the many clips of musical numbers from Hello Dolly on YouTube, but that song isn’t in the play, it’s only in the movie.

But the clips from the movie are all blocked from my viewing here in Germany, so I don’t know for sure if the clips I found of the opening of the movie includes that song. But I did run across one woman singing it on YouTube, accompanied by stills of Barbra Streisand in scenes from the movie. The odd part is that the singer isn’t supposed to be Barbra Streisand, but if it isn’t Streisand, the singer sounds remarkably like her.

But I digress. You can definitely leave everything to me when it comes to winding down the road away from the topic of a blog post.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with links below to performances of Route 66.  My “timely tip” (as the song says) is that the refrain of that song may stick in your head if you’re not careful.

Enjoy. 😉

Route 66:

• Sung by the Nat King Cole Trio (jazz version)
• Sung by The Manhattan Transfer (jazz version)
• Sung by the Rolling Stones (rock and roll version)