If you have to go outdoors today, try not to breathe. Smoke from more than 100 Canadian wildfires, most of them uncontrolled, has produced air quality alerts throughout the Northeastern U.S. Northern Delaware is at the southern edge of the plume on the linked map, but those aren’t clouds giving us that hazy sky.
The Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach tune came from the 1933 Broadway musical “Roberta,” where it was sung by Ukrainian-born actress Tamara Drasin, playing a Russian princess in disguise. The cast also included Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray and Sidney Greenstreet, none of whom was famous yet. The song soon became a standard, recorded by dozens of big bands and singers before the Platters released their version in 1958, when Tony Williams’ sweet tenor made it a No. 1 hit.
That wasn’t the last version to make the charts. Bryan Ferry’s single reached No. 17 in the UK in 1974.
Here’s the original, where Tamara Drasin gave it a world-weary reading befitting a Russian princess.
