Even though Chris and I currently have no permanent address, our current nomadic Plan G tour sees us setting down temporary roots for longer than a month in many places.  In order to do that, we’ve been renting vacation apartments which come fully furnished – and also furnish us a way to have a mailing address.

A great unforseen side-benefit of that is that we have the ability to get a library card in many places. All the towns we’ve temporarily lived-in have had methods for getting library cards that involve getting mail at a local address.  Santa Barbara has a great service to facilitate this: they provide you with a postage-paid postcard that you fill out and give back to them. They mail you the card, which you then you bring back to the library to get your card. Very easy – no waiting or messing around with getting official mail from other sources. Nice.

In Seattle they took any kind of mail that was sent in your name to your address, so there we brought a large shipping box that had my name and address on it. Definitely not as convenient as the Santa Barbara postcard.

In Vancouver, you didn’t to show any mail – you just had to pay $30 for 3 months. Not as convenient. But at least we were able to do it.

BTW, after having been away from the U.S. for so long, it’s been fun to realize that the libraries now have ways to request books via their websites. I did that a lot in Seattle, getting books that were housed in community branches all over the city, and having them delivered to my local branch which was just two blocks away. A very nice feature of modern libraries, IMHO, and something that changed over the 11 years Chris and lived outside the U.S.

Anyway, to end this brief homage to libraries and library cards, I’ll offer a few appropriate Broadway show tunes.  But of course – I mean, some things never change.

1. A Trip to the Library, from the musical She Loves Me. I’ve posted this song before, but today’s clip is performed by Jane Krakowski, who is up for a Tony Award on Sunday for her performance in this year’s revival of She Loves Me.  (Tony Awards are on Sunday, June 12th). BTW, the clip in that link is just a small snippet of her performing the song.  Here’s a link to the whole song performed by Sally Mayes, a woman who was nominated for a Tony award for the same role years ago in an earlier revival.
2. Marian, The Librarian: a classic song and scene from the musical The Music Man.  I think that Marian might have appreciated the idea that people nowadays can access the library books online, instead of causing so much ruckus dancing around her library.
3. Belle, from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. In the song, Belle doesn’t have a library in her little middle ages European town, but she always has her “nose stuck in a book.” I bring this up in part to forestall any questions about whether or not we visited the libraries when we lived in Italy and Germany.  Here’s the scoop: in Italy, the library was intimidating: no open stacks, plus I didn’t read Italian very well.  In Germany, it worked more like the North American libraries I was used to, with open stacks and a library card you could get with an ID – and proof of a mailing address. So while we lived in Tübingen, Chris and I both had library cards. As proof, I offer this old post I wrote about it all back then. Enjoy reading that,  as you’re listing to all the musical trips to the library…