This week on “Sweetness and Light,” I invite you to a holiday tea party. That’s right, the music will all in some way be related to tea.

We’ll get the kettle roiling with Dmitri Shostakovich’s charming arrangement of “Tea for Two,” recollect the elegant Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel in days of yore with Samuel Barber’s “Souvenirs,” and experience sugar-induced hallucinations of dancing tea leaves in Richard Strauss’ high-calorie ballet “Schlagobers,” or “Whipped Cream.”

Lewis Carroll’s Hatter may have been mad, but even he would think twice before imperiling an “unbirthday” with a fidgety monkey. The maddening patter of the 1953 novelty song “The Little Red Monkey” relates a simmering simian’s reactions to violin, euphonium, and tea.

Your eyes will be pinwheeling and your brain will be humming from an overindulgence of caffeine and cake when you join me for “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

For as disturbing as “The Little Red Monkey” is, Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella, “Green Tea,” is the ultimate cautionary tale about tea and monkeys:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11635/pg11635-images.html

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