“The birdbath looks like a coconut cake,†my wife said.
In addition to beauty, the sight offered two benefits.
1. It was a reliable indicator of how much snow we had last night on the cusp of a winter that the forecasters said not long ago was likely to be mild and possibly snowless.
2. It provided an excuse—as if one was needed—to listen to Woody Herman’s “Let it Snow†(1945) with Herman’s vocal, solos by trumpeter Sonny Berman and trombonist Bill Harris, and a Neil Hefti arrangement. Hefti crafted an audacious introduction, and a coda referring to it, that make the arrangement a masterpiece among the many gems that he provided Herman’s First Herd.
Hefti (1922-2008) wrote the theme music for the enormously popular Batman television series in the 1960s. In his later years, it amused him to tell people that he also wrote the lyric.