Music and Insurance

I’m writing this while I listen to the soundtrack music from Cast a Giant Shadow by Elmer Bernstein. It’s wonderfully evocative stuff, even more so because we used a couple of the earlier tracks from it when we did the play, The Diary of Anne Frank, a couple of years ago. The melancholy music set the tone for the play from the word go, and I’m sure was helpful in putting the cast in the right mood. Even now I have that sense of being back in the wings waiting for the play to start, listening to this music.
I’m not sure, if I was a director of a play, whether I’d do well in getting the right kind of music for it. Even though I’m a musician, I don’t seem to have quite the instinct for what’s appropriate. The director of Anne Frank asked me to suggest some music for the play when we were still in rehearsal, and she hated all the stuff I thought was right! Admittedly some of it was Shostakovich, who isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was certainly Jewish in tone.

Apropos not at all of the above, I see that insurance companies have a new racket going: encouraging expectant parents to insure against the possibility that their baby may have defects. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking there’s something slightly immoral about this idea. Certainly extra cash might not go amiss if your child turned out to have Downs Syndrome, or such, but to start insuring against that a year or more before you have a baby somehow sets my teeth on edge. Even if it does make sense financially.
I know it’s not uncommon to insure children, yet I remember being faintly surprised when someone told me that the child insurance had paid for the headstone after his boy was accidentally killed.
In spite of having had five kids I never gave the notion of insuring them a thought. There are just some things that don’t seem right to insure. Perhaps I’m totally wrong here.