The More Things Change
“They won the war but we had all the good songs,” Elise said, looking up from her computer where she was working on a prose poem. “Who said that? The Irish? They should know.”
“Nope,” her husband Maurice said. “Tom Lehrer. ‘The Folk Song Army.’”
“Not the Irish?”
“Spanish Civil War,” he said. He moved her file and sat on the chair beside her at their old teak table. “Franco won. ‘They won the war but we had all the best songs.’”
“What songs? What songs were better than winning?”
“Not better,” he said. “Just walking away with something. ‘Viva La Quinze Brigada.’ ‘Long Live the Fifth Column.’”
“See,” she said, “you do know everything.”
Deborah Ann Percy (Johnston) lives in Kalamazoo and South Haven, Michigan. She earned the MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan. Her two collections of short fiction are Cool Front: Stories from Lake Michigan (March Street Press, 2010) and Invisible Traffic (One Wet Shoe Press, 2014). Her plays, and those written in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Johnston, have won awards, publication, and over 300 productions and readings nationwide. Their twenty or so books include the recent children's book Mr. Robert Monkey Returns to New York (Brandylane Publishers, 2021). Since 2003 over two dozen of their half-hour radio dramas have been broadcast on Kalamazoo’s NPR-affiliate WMUK-FM as part of All Ears Theatre. Her favorite charity is Kalamazoo's Loaves and Fishes.
