When I was a kid, my mother had a copy of Erma Bombeck’s If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?. I knew the title was supposed to be a joke, but I didn’t catch the reference to the 1931 song lyrics by Lew Brown and Buddy De Sylva (with music Ray Henderson). It’s a fun little song that was featured In George White’s “Scandals.” Here’s a taste:
Life is just a bowl of cherries
Don’t take it serious,
Life’s too mysterious
You work,
You save,
You worry so
But you can’t take your dough
When you go, go, goSo keep repeating “It’s the berries.”
The strongest oak must fall
The sweet things in life
To you were just loaned
So how can you lose
What you’ve never owned.
You can listen to Ethel Merman’s version here, or a Dean Martin/Gisele MacKenzie rendition here.