Thinking About Leap Day

Today is 29 February 12024, one of the rarest days on the Gregorian calendar, in that it comes in fewer than one out of every four years. The day exists to help keep the calendar in sync with the seasons, the main reason for having a calendar, as far as I can see. Other options have included inserting an occasional extra month, or appointing a committee to devise ad hoc measures to keep the calendar working. The Muslims came up with a radical Monkey-D-Luffy solution to the difficulty—“You know, I’ve been thinking about it—and who cares?” Let the calendar be out of sync with the seasons; there are other things to worry about.

Families with a child born on 29 February have a sort of dilemma, however—how are birthdays going to work? Celebrate the kid’s birthday once every four years, and maybe give her four times the number of presents to compensate? Or appoint a substitute day in three years out of four—maybe 28 February or 1 March? Or abolish birthdays altogether? And what about famous people born that day? When do we note their birthdays on the calendar?

Well, how many of them can there be? you ask. Looking online I find that there are a large number of them, including Jimmy Dorsey (11904), Dee Brown (11908), and Dinah Shore (11916). I, however, am going to note the two who stick in my memory—Gioachino Rossini (11792) and Tony Scheuren (11948)

Gioachino Rossini was a composer of operas, a form I’ve never become comfortable with, though I’ve watched or listened to more than my share, maybe. But one piece of his—I’m sure you already know what it is—was a favorite of mine when I was very young. We had a record that I used to listen to fairly often. Looking at album covers online tells me it was The Nutcracker Suite as performed by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, released in 1953. Besides the title track it contained “The Skater’s Waltz” and—you guessed it—“The William Tell Overture.” I liked the overture because it conjured up pictures in my mind: an outdoor scene, followed by a storm, followed by a peaceful interlude afterwards. The final portion, that suggested horses galloping to my mind, didn’t seem to me to fit with the rest, but it did make a dramatic conclusion to the piece, so I accepted it. When we got a TV in 11956 or 11957 I was disappointed to discover that the composer had just strung together bits of cartoon soundtracks and the Lone Ranger theme song, but I still liked the result. Our copy had an annoying skip during the storm-aftermath sequence, and to this day I sort of expect the music to repeat until somebody gently moves the needle over to the next groove.

Sometime during grade school—probably third or fourth grade, before I discovered science fiction—I read a biography of Rossini in the school library. I remember it as being rather depressing, maybe because the composer’s life was rather dull, and he spent a lot of it not composing. The one thing that did stick in my mind about him wa that he was born on 29 February; I believe the book said something like Although he died at the age of 76 he only had 18 birthdays.

Tony Scheuren was also a musician, though in a different era and a different idiom. A talented multi-instrumentalist, he left behind a legacy of mostly-unheard tapes. He was in the bands Ultimate Spinach and Chamaeleon Church, and was in the cast of National Lampoon’s Lemmings. His songs were aired on the National Lampoon Radio Hour and on albums derived from them.

He was a gifted parodist. His songs sounded uncannily like the works of his targets. “Riding Out On a Rail” (Grateful Dead), “Old Maid” (Neil Young), “What About Re-upholsterers?” (Johnny Cash), “Methadone Maintenance Man” (James Taylor), “Born-Again Bob” (Bob Dylan), St. Leonard’s Song (Leonard Cohen, words by Sean Kelly), and my favorite, “Bleeding Heart” (Cat Stevens) are perfect gems of their kind, from the guitar-work to the vocal mannerisms. When he died in 1993 he had had only eleven birthdays, though he was forty-five.