In the Arrivederci Roma nightclub, bar and grill

Standing in the fiberglass ruins watching time stand still

All your troubles you confess

To another faceless backless dress   

Schnapps, chianti, porter and ouzo

Pernod, vodka, sambuca, I love you so

Deportee


Tatty beauty talking in riddles

Rome burns down everybody's on the fiddle

Two thousand dollars for a wife and some class

A thousand years drowned in a chaser glass

How I wish that she was mine

Could have been a king in 6/8 time

Schnapps, chianti, porter and ouzo

Pernod, vodka, sambuca, I love you so

Deportee


It's a brittle charm but she's had enough

Still she wrote her number on his paper cuff

You don't know where to start or where to stop

All this pillow talk is nothing more than talking shop


When I came here tonight my pockets were overflowing

They took my return ticket without me even knowing

I pray to the saints and all the martyrs

For the secret life of Frank Sinatra

But none of these things have come to pass

In America the law is a piece of ass

And I'm a deportee


                                    - “The Deportees Club”, By Elvis Costello

The Secret Life

Listen to

”The Deportees Club”
 

    Napoleon Bonaparte said it best when he declared, “The distance between the ridiculous and the sublime is but a single step.”  The quote is made all the more powerful when one realizes that a man can step in either direction.


    A story of how great men fall to lesser obstacles... or is it about how all men, in believing in their greatness, inevitably fall to the greatest obstacle of all?  The price is unimaginable.  The willingness to pay, even more-so.


    Here is where the lines between sanity and hope get blurred to the point of no return, possibly to the point of absurdity.  Does anyone ever get out alive?  Would anyone want to?  To quote Sinatra, “You gotta’ love livin’ baby, ‘cause dyin’s a pain in the ass.”