Driving to Montreal earlier this week, my son and I listened to lots of music, including Frank Sinatra (son indulging mother).

As my son listened to the lyrics of “Love and Marriage,” he got this funny look on his face and then he exploded: “How can you listen to this? It’s all about oppression!”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, ‘Love and marriage, love and marriage / They go together like a horse and carriage.’ That means that love is the horse and marriage is the carriage. The wild, free horse is tamed and has to pull this heavy carriage. Marriage is oppression.”

The speech over, he waited for a response. What could I say? He had given that metaphoric analogy quite the interpretation.

As an aside, Frank recorded the song first in 1955 for a television version of Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town (according to Wikipedia).