Relay: She Can Do Anything

Her: Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.

    Him: No you can’t.

    Her: Yes I can.

    Him: No you can’t.

    Her: Yes I can.

She is Annie Oakley, he is Frank Powers, and it is 1946. Ethel Merman and Frank Middleton are playing the roles. The show is “Annie Get Your Gun,” with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and a book by a brother-and-sister team, Dorothy and Herbert Fields. If I could go back in time to see three shows from the last century, this might be one of them, along with the original production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “Hamlet” with John Barrymore.

But, I digress. It is 1946, the war is over, and the world has changed. Women rolled up their sleeves during the war, taking on jobs previously held by men.

Annie Oakley was a perfect character for her time, and that was a perfect song for that time, and for our time. Don’t believe me? Take shoveling snow.

It was another March snowstorm. Will it ever stop snowing?

But, I digress. It was a Friday morning. I had a cup of green tea, steeling myself for the task ahead. About seven or eight inches of wet snow lay on the ground in front of my car, along with a pile of whatever that was plowed into my drive by the Highway Department. The temperature was well below freezing. I prepared to go out and shovel.

We have wintered in Montauk for over 25 years. For much of that time, we were in a rental in Ditch. The driveway was fairly long, and was in a cut. A bad storm meant a lot of shoveling, lifting, tossing snow. There were storms that resulted in three or four hours of work.

But, the payoff, ah the payoff, it is a thing of beauty. A blacktop driveway in a wintry white world that you have shoveled clean.

Since we moved from Ditch, it is not such an ordeal. I need to clear maybe 12 square feet of ground where we are now, at most. I probably spent an hour, hour and a half digging out from Juno in January. That would easily have been four hours in Ditch.

I was ready to start shoveling that Friday, but I had a story to finish. “I’ll help,” Carole said. “Sure, hon,” I said. I was staring at the keyboard. She put on her coat and went outside.

About 10 minutes later, story finished, I went out, and walked around to the drive. There was Carole, shovel in hand. The drive was free of snow. “I’m finished,” she said.

I was stunned. Then, Carole confessed. “Peter Joyce came by in a truck,” she said. “He plowed, and his worker shoveled.”

I was reminded of a famous scene from that seminal 1934 road movie, “It Happened One Night,” directed by Frank Capra, written by Robert Riskin, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

The two of them are stranded on the road. Gable brags to Colbert that he is a master hitchhiker. “It’s all in the thumb, see?” he says, as he demonstrates for her his three different styles of hitching. Then he steps out into the road. Car after car whizzes by.

“Let me try,” she says.

“You?”

“I’ll stop a car, and I won’t use my thumb.”

In one of the most famous moments of the early talkies, she goes to the side of the road, sticks out her leg, hitches up her skirt, and a driver slams on the brakes.

They have their ride. 

Now, Carole didn’t use any such method, she simply went out there with a shovel. I can’t thank Peter Joyce enough for helping her out.

But, when next year’s first snow falls I think I will stay in bed.

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star who covers police and courts along with planning and zoning.