South Pacific - Part 11 of 13

My Girl Back Home

The 1949 Broadway musical South Pacific was ground-breaking because one of its themes was overcoming racial prejudice.  Even though Lieutenant Joe Cable loves the Tonkinese (Vietnamese) girl Liat, he tells her he can't marry her.  Why?  Because he comes from upper-class Philadelphia society and Princeton.  In that world in the 1940s, marrying an Asian girl was socially unacceptable.

Similarly, nurse Nellie Forbush rejects her suitor Emile de Beque when she finds out that he has two children by his former Polynesian wife.  Nellie comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, and the way she was brought up, anyone who isn't white (like a Polynesian) is black.

In the song My Girl Back Home, Joe and Nellie sing about how different things are in the South Pacific from what they left behind back home.

The original lyrics start like this.  Joe sings:

        My girl back home, I'd almost forgot

        A blue-eyed kid, I liked her a lot

        We got engaged, both families were glad

        And I was told by my uncle and dad that if I were clever and able

        They'd make me a part of a partnership

        Cable, Cable and Cable.

Note that even in the original, Joe is at best lukewarm about his girl back home ("I liked her a lot").

In my version of the story, both Joe Cable and Nelson Forbush are struggling with sexuality, not with racial prejudice.  Joe always thought he was straight, but now he's fallen for Bloody Mary's son Lee.  Nelson loves Jack de Coq, but he thinks Jack must be straight because he has kids.

For my version of My Girl Back Home, I used some of the visuals of Cable singing from the movie, but, of course, I changed the words.  I couldn't use the visuals from the second verse with the female nurse Nellie, so I added my own second verse to expand on Joe's days at Princeton, and show that maybe he's not as straight as he thinks he is

Note: there actually was a Princeton tradition, called the Nude Olympics, that involved students running naked around a courtyard after the first snowfall, but it didn't start until the 1970s, and I only have grainy video footage of it.  I substituted a clip of a similar nude run at Harvard.