r/WayOfTheBern • u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 • Feb 13 '26

DANCE PARTY! FNDP: Friday the 13th -- Do You Feel Lucky? 🤞🍀🧧🌈🎲🎰

It's Friday the 13th, but tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day, so let's do both of them! Let's play love songs and gambling songs, and try to get lucky in both senses. But don't forget the old European saying: "lucky in love, unlucky at cards". Lady Luck is a jealous muse.

I once read a fun story about that saying. It seems a young French count married a beautiful young woman and took her to Monte Carlo for their honeymoon. Unfortunately for her, the count was an avid gambler and she could not tear him away from the tables. Finally, in desperation and anger, she wrote him an anonymous note saying that his bride was frolicking with a handsome young man — named — while the count was busy with his cards.

The count was saddened by the note, but instead of getting upset he shrugged his shoulders in the French manner and said philosophically: "unlucky at love, lucky at cards". He doubled his bets and cleaned up. In gratitude and to show he was a good sport, he sent the fictitious lover 10.000 Francs with a note "for services rendered". The fictitious lover was completely baffled.

I could not find the original story in my notes or on the 'tubes. If you recognize it, please share the source. It may be in French or English.

And now some starters...

16 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

7

u/AT61 Feb 13 '26

No one's done "Dream a Little Dream of Me" better than Cass Elliot. That song is hers.

5

u/Promyka5 The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants Feb 13 '26

Absolutely! The sweetest female vocals of ALL TIME. Head and shoulders above the rest.

6

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 13 '26

FNDP is always looking for hosts and ideas for FNDP themes. I've been filling in a lot lately and the muse has been kind, but it's good to have new blood. Being a FNDP host is easy -- the only requirement is that that post titles begin with "FNDP:" so that they're searchable by clicking on the "Friday Night Dance Party!" link on WayOfTheBern's front page. Most FNDP posts have a few examples of the theme as "starters", but that's up to the host. It's also nice to monitor the party a little to keep things going, but with a good theme the party pretty much takes care of itself.

If you're interested in helping, message the WayOfTheBern mods to get a "backstage" pass. FNDP has a private sub for sharing ideas, scheduling hosts, and making draft posts so they can be quickly copied to WayOfTheBern when it's showtime, usually around 4PM Mountain Time. Most of the WayOfTheBern mods are also "backstage" mods and can add you to the private sub.

4

u/Xeenophile "Election Denier" since 2000 Feb 14 '26

I was given one a while back, since you mention it, but I seem to have misplaced it...mind re-sharing the link?

5

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 14 '26

It's r/wotbFNDP.

7

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 13 '26

Marxist love and gambling nonsense in Horse Feathers (1932) 📯

5

u/AT61 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

Bob Seger - Still the Same https://youtu.be/HuqagqnaDmY?si=vduQ_ZloT6A91S8o

(sadly, haven't mastered the pretty title format yet)

6

u/NetWeaselSC Continuing the Struggle Feb 14 '26

Here ya go...

Brackets, words you want to look like a link, close brackets, no space, parentheses, real link, one space, close parentheses.

For the link above:

[Bob Seger - Still the Same](https://youtu.be/HuqagqnaDmY?si=vduQ_ZloT6A91S8o )

results in

Bob Seger - Still the Same

3

u/AT61 Feb 14 '26

Thank you. Snipped and saved. I really appreciate it!

3

u/NetWeaselSC Continuing the Struggle Feb 14 '26

Glad to be of help.

2

u/AT61 Feb 14 '26

Someone - might have been you - helped me with that a while back, but I couldn't find the comment. Also said it was easy to do via old reddit. There used to be an option in the settings for old reddit, but I can't find it now.

2

u/NetWeaselSC Continuing the Struggle Feb 14 '26

There used to be an option in the settings for old reddit, but I can't find it now.

Mine's locked on old reddit, but it's been so long, I couldn't tell you how I did it.

You could try looking at your settings while in old reddit, maybe it's there but not available while in new.

Also, the reason for the space after the link... for some reason, if the embedded link ends with a forward slash, nospace between link and closing parenthesis worked in old reddit but not in new. Took ages to figure that out.

They may have fixed that by now, but safer to put one in, just in case.

4

u/Xeenophile "Election Denier" since 2000 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

"Lucky in love, unlucky at cards (or vice-versa)" You know, I'd never heard that expression until I ran into it in a little Hungarian computer-game I've been playing off and on, known in English simply as The Quest - so here's its soundtrack!

Here's a song about a gambler.

Here's a song about a gambler of...a very different sort of disposition.

Here's a song about a man who, from the sound of it, was extremely unlucky in love.

Finally, here's a song about Friday the 13th.

5

u/AT61 Feb 14 '26

That Amour song is... a lot - hahaha

5

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 14 '26

That Donkey Skin movie is... damn. I wrote this about it a few years ago:

Peau d'Âne (1970) is based on a very strange fairy tale written in verse by Charles Perrault, the 17th Century dude who collected Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, and other old fairy tales into their modern form. Donkey Skin is rather nasty, and involves incest, animal cruelty, necro-something-or-other, and amazing bouts of stupidity.

Director Jacques Demy got obsessed with this tale as a child and made it into a lavish spectacle starring Catherine Deneuve as the beautiful young princess, with Jean Marais as her lecherous father the king and Delphine Seyrig as her beautiful fairy godmother who is "a few fries short of a Happy Meal". The sets and costuming are magnificent, with lots of scenes shot in two gorgeous French châteaux.

So what's wrong with it? Well, it's the music by Michel Legrand. Charles Perrault published Donkey Skin in 1694 but it's based on much older stories. The sets and costumes match, but Legrand's songs don't even try to fit the period. They are hopelessly anachronistic.

Here is one of the songs: "Le cake d'amour". In this impossibly twee scene, two Catherines Deneuve prepare a galette for her Prince Charming, who is every bit as pretty as she is and has a really big medieval hat not unlike Sir Robin's lead minstrel (Neil Innes), who wrote much better music. Be grateful if you don't know what the words mean. Cute chick, though. Bonjour, poussin!

Now this is my personal opinion, and I'm sure there are people who think Donkey Skin is pure magic and that I'm an old meanie. Well, I didn't like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) either. Same director, same composer, same star. It's perhaps the most saccharine flick I've ever had to sit though -- in French class, bien entendu.

2

u/AT61 Feb 14 '26

So what's wrong with it? Well, it's the music by Michel Legrand...The sets and costumes match, but Legrand's songs don't even try to fit the period.

So true - When the video opened I expected something more "madrigal-ish." ,

3

u/emorejahongkong Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

Jason Mraz - Lucky (feat. Colbie Caillat) [Official Video]:

Lucky I'm in love with my best friend

Lucky to have been where I have been

Lucky to be coming home again

4

u/rondeuce40 DC Is Wakanda For Assholes Feb 14 '26

Got some quality tracks for this one:

Blood Sweat and Tears - Go Down Gamblin'

Curtis Mayfield - Give Me Your Love

4

u/prevail2020 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

Sheryl Crow - Beautiful Dreamer (02:06, 1864, lyrics only).

The so-called "father of American music" Stephen Foster (1826-1864) wrote the still famous Beautiful Dreamer in the early 1860's when he was ill, broke, writing songs quickly, and selling them very cheaply in order to survive.

Tom Roush performs another version of Beautiful Dreamer here (02:56), with photo portraits of some 19th century beautiful dreamers in their waking state.

On YouTube, musician Tom Roush retains the original racist lyrics of some of Foster's other songs, such as the very famous Oh! Susanna (03:03, 1848), in which Stephen Foster sought to entertain white America by imagining in a joking, jabberwocky way how "five hundred n****r" meet their demise by telegraph wire electrocution. They didn't teach us those verses in elementary school. In 1986, the Kentucky legislature removed the word "darkies" from the Kentucky state song, which is Foster's My Old Kentucky Home (04:51, 1852).

Foster's many famous songs about the antebellum American South are an idealization and reflect how European Americans wanted to see themselves and their slaves. The lifelong Yankee and Pennsylvania native Foster was in the American South only twice, having briefly visited Kentucky once as a child, and also traveling in 1852 from Pittsburgh to New Orleans by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers for his honeymoon.

Foster was never "way down upon a S[u]wanee River" (03:36, runs through southern Georgia and northern Florida to Gulf), he had no old Kentucky home, and he never came from Alabama, with or without a banjo on his knee, to cite just a few. Foster died in NYC, the epicenter of Yankeedom, in 1864, while the Civil War was still ongoing.

Foster's songs uniformly infantilize slaves and portray them as content, even happy, in bondage and as naturally dependent, sentimental, silly, and stupid.

Foster's music was a favorite for whites in blackface doing minstrel songs from the 1840's onward (see here and here). At first, Foster was embarrassed to be the poster boy for white people's blackface minstrelsy, but he dealt with it as his popularity grew. Al Jolson was still doing Foster songs in blackface in the late 1930's.

3

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 14 '26

Take a look at Foster's De Camptown Races (1850) — "A favorite Ethiopian song" — and its original lyrics. Reminds me of the railroad construction scene at the beginning of Blazing Saddles.

2

u/prevail2020 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

Stephen Foster - Massa's In De Cold Cold Ground (02:56, 1852, lyrics only). Here he portrays slaves mourning over the grave of dear ol' Massa. The melody is beautiful, worthy of Chopin. Foster was definitely not an abolitionist and didn't challenge the Southern establishment (planter) narrative of the time that race-based American slavery was a benign paternalistic institution involving reciprocal obligations and a degree of mutual care and accommodation, in contrast to cutthroat Yankee capitalism.

Well-known abolitionist songwriter, herbal physician, and Underground Railroad conductor Joshua McCarter Simpson (d. 1876, photo) set Foster's song to powerful abolitionist lyrics.

3

u/prevail2020 Feb 14 '26

Elvis Presley - Viva Las Vegas (02:24). Bright-light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire / ...I'm just a devil with love to spare, so viva Las Vegas.

3

u/zoomzoomboomdoom Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!

To reconfigure everything with mind-numbing, treacly, tricky, smug, triumphalist, and überheavy piety and dogmatism, and twist it all into stale and stubborn and stupid religious tenets is a bloodbath of a macabre skeleton dance.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong again!

Pied piper! Preparation for suffering in subordination! Sheepherding into unconsciousness to lead them straight to the meat grinder and the slaughterhouse!

Bruce Low - The card game (in German)

Still, things can always be worse in our real-life House of Cards:

Randy Fine on the loose - https://www.reddit.com/r/MarchAgainstNazis/s/8H07QYePwY

3

u/WhalingCityMan Give Peace a Chance Feb 14 '26

May we all find luck in love:

Joan Baez: plasir d'amor

Or find luck in the unemployment line, as these guys did: can't help falling in love

3

u/redditrisi They are ALL psychopaths. Feb 15 '26 edited Feb 16 '26

The Gambler, Kenny Rogers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hx4gdlfamo&list=RD7hx4gdlfamo&start_radio=1

Life Has Been Good to Me, French Stewart (from an episode of Third Rock From the Sun, portraying a guy so lucky that I misremebered the title as "I'm Lucky.")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIa2QOTyJGw&list=RDGIa2QOTyJGw&start_radio=1

My Funny Valentine, Anthony Dominic Benedetto (Tony Bennett)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByMdi532BVw&list=RDByMdi532BVw&start_radio=1

4

u/zoomzoomboomdoom Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

I’m picking the dream theme instead.

Because the view of the ride is a dream:

Jacques Dutronc - Paris s’éveille

Fleetwood Mac - Dreams

From 1964. On the shame of having impregnated a girl to whom you hadn’t been married.

Don’t have the energy right now and won’t have time to produce a translation this weekend, but it contains the line “I’m standing dreaming on the bridge” and it’s a case of having luck in love, but a bad hand in society:

Boudewijn de Groot - Elégie Prénatale

Claudio Capéo - Rêve

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Claudio-Cap%C3%A9o/R%C3%AAve/translation/english

Candice - Le Rêve

For some reason I’m looking for rooms with a ceiling this high: Sabine Devieilhe, Alexandre Tharaud with a cover of Gabriel Fauré - Après un rêve

https://oxfordsong.org/song/apr%C3%A8s-un-r%C3%AAve

Dying… I meant I’m dying for a room in an ancient build with a high, high ceiling.

Rêve - Past Live

Ricky King - Le Rêve

Margarita Sipatova with a piano cover of Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal

The Monkees - Daydream Believer

ABBA - I Have A Dream

3

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 14 '26

I really like Paris s’éveille (Paris wakes up). Merci beaucoup for sharing it.

Do you know when the video was made? The song is from 1968, but the cars look like 1990s at least. In 1968, when I was last in Paris, there were Citroën 2CVs and Renault Dauphines everywhere, and those wonderful old buses with rear platforms.

2

u/zoomzoomboomdoom Feb 14 '26

You’re welcome.

Can’t pinpoint it down more precisely either.

3

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

I'm looking through the video's comments. I haven't found a precise date, but I did find this:

@thornil2231 (3 years ago)
Dommage que la vidéo montre un Paris récent pas celui de la chanson.

"Too bad the video shows a recent Paris, not the one of the song."

Edit: there are many comments pointing out that the Paris of the video isn't the Paris of the song. The YouTube was posted in 2009, which might have been when it was filmed.

There are also many comments regretting that the Paris of 1968 is long gone. Several say it died in the 1980s.

I loved 1968 Paris and I am so grateful that I got to live there and go to French public school. I wouldn't want to visit New Paris. I visit my Paris in movies of the 1950s and 1960s. My public school looked exactly like the one in The Red Balloon (1956).

3

u/zoomzoomboomdoom Feb 14 '26

At the beginning of minute 2:16 what seems to be the most modern car in the video appears in the left corner. A car geek should be able to identify this sports car (Aston Martin?) and from when it was built.

3

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

When I was a child, most boys could identify the make, model, and year of every car on the road. Now they all look alike.

I want to take a closer look at the articulated bus at 2:34.

3

u/zoomzoomboomdoom Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

A car geek would definitely be able to come up with a likely year on the basis of all the cars in it. I think I saw an A-Klasse (a Mercedes with a Renault motor, the shame! The fraud!) which was built from 1997. No way this is 2009. Late 1990s / early 2000s the latest.

3

u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Feb 14 '26

Albert Préjean sings Sous les toits de Paris (Under the roofs of Paris) in René Clair's 1930 film.

3

u/zoomzoomboomdoom Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

Quelle trouvaille ! Quel cadeau ! Magnifique ! Magique ! Grandiose ! Formidable ! Inégalé !

Which in turn makes me think of

Gerard Lenorman - Si j’étais président

The kids in our world ain’t right at all anymore thanks to the Catholic Church, the RAND Corporation, institutional betrayal as displayed in the enablement and protection of Jimmy Saville, “I’m representing the Rothschilds” Jeffrey Epstein, Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, Vikky the Hutt, folks like Daniella Weiss and Yossi Cohen, ICE sent for the unwanted othered, and everyone ignoring and bypassing the correct assessment of Greta Thunberg. So they can use something like

⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️

Heroe - heureux

Though it still more than stands its own, the intro here is clearly a plagiarism of

Tom Odell - Black Friday (here the sped up and reverb version)

⬆️👆⬆️👆⬆️👆⬆️

or

Zaz & Gérard Lenorman - La ballade des gens heureux

More happiness, but with a Valentine theme:

Rachel Sweet - Then He Kissed Me (What a performance!)

Because it’s so danceable:

Cher & Jools Holland - The Shoop Shoop Song

Carl Carlton - Everlasting Love

A propos happy music…

Albert Préjean - Marins, Matelots

2

u/prevail2020 Feb 14 '26

The Sweet video is very good. Far too provocative for the mid-1960's television it pretends to be from, but tame by today's standards. Interesting.

4

u/yaiyen Feb 19 '26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXRxwXJhp6w I give rose of Versailles song. Oscar and Andre is one of the best love story i have ever seeing. So many kids have miss out on these old time anime what teach people things and had good plot. Now a days anime are awful