Posts tagged Guys & Dolls

First of all, as with a lot of Guys and Dolls, there are a lot of double and triple meanings to the names and words chosen by the writer of the play’s book.  In Sky’s case, he’s wooing Sarah Brown with her own weapon: the bible.

In a world where the amount of cheesecake or strudle sold at Mindy’s one morning could amount to a large amount of cash, information is king.  Shadrach, Mischach, and Abednego were Hebrews about to be punished in Babylonia by King Nebuchadnezzer for not worshiping his idol.  They were compelled to be thrown into a fiery furnace and burned alive.  An angel was sent down to save them and they emerged from the furnace unscathed.  This compelled the king to accept the validity of the Jewish God.  All of this is written down in the book of Daniel (the same book that includes the saying “the writing’s on the wall,” implying doom to the king if he does not heed the word of God).  Again, it’s all about knowing the future.  If you’re thrown into a fiery furnace for your own beliefs, the betting odds are against you that you’ll ever emerge alive.

Hence, betting on Shadrach, Mischach, and Abednego to “show” before the hot race (or picking the trifecta) would be a very long shot indeed.  Sky could win $5,000 in a parley bet like that.  

A parlay is the practice of rolling your winnings from one race to make a bet on the next race and not skimming any profit until you’ve also won the third race.  You’re either desperate or very inspired to trust your luck three races in a row.

How to Make a Show Parlay Bet on Horse Races

Are you with a group of friends betting on horses at the racetrack? A fun way to bet on horse races that gets everyone in your party involved is a group show parlay. It works like this: Have each person ante up $5, and pool the money. Each person in the group picks one race and one horse to bet to show. Place the first bet, and if you win, parlay the money on the next race and horse. Your winnings can add up very quickly. For example, if four people start with $20 and each person wins a $3 show price, you’ll have $101 after only four races!

(http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/betting-on-horse-racing-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html)

Of course, to Sarah Brown the answer to everyone’s future is found in the pages of the bible.  How ironic that ace gambler Sky Masterson knows it so much better than she!

“The earliest reference I can find is from the song ‘Sue Me, Sue Me’, in the musical ‘Guys and Dolls’. This was a Broadway show in 1950 and released as a film in 1955. This was composed by Frank Loesser and sung in the film version by Frank Sinatra (as Nathan Detroit) and Vivian Blaine (as Miss Adelaide):

Detroit: Serve a paper and sue me, sue me, what can you do me? I love you. Give a holler and hate me, hate me, go ahead, hate me. I love you.

Adelaide: When you wind up in jail, don’t come to me to bail you out.

Detroit: Alright already, so call a policeman. Alright already, it’s true, you knew, so sue me, sue me, what can you do me. I love you.

In the original stage version the line ‘you knew’ was given as ‘so nu’. Nu is a Yiddish word meaning (depending on who you ask) something like ‘what did you expect?’. This gives some weight to the suggestion that several American correspondents of mine have made - that the phrase is Yiddish and was in common use by Jewish men in New York prior to 1950. That would fit with the meaning of the line in the song. Loesser was Jewish, was born in and died in New York, and would certainly be familiar with ‘so nu’. ‘So nu, so sue’ is Loesser’s kind of rhyme and the jump to ‘so sue me’ being Yiddish isn’t a large one.”

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/so-sue-me.html

Woody,

According to William Kennedy who wrote the forward to the Guys & Dolls book you lent me, gangsters in the forties and fifties prized their attire first and their lawyers in a close second.  One gangster prided himself on being brought up on charges over fifty times and never served a day in jail.  This, of course, was due to his excellent legal counsel.  These are hoodlums perpetrating the air of businessmen with pretensions of normalcy.

-isaac