This is the power of the internet. And something I'm gradually learning - just about everything I vaguely remember but want to know more about, as long as I've got a distinctive phrase, I can find it on there.

I was thinking this morning - just in general, understand, nothing specific - about the perils that falling in love is fraught with. (This is something I have thought and contemplated, off and on, for a long, long time, as you will soon see).

I suddenly had a mental image - driving home from somewhere, late in the evening, as a kid, in the car with my parents. My dad had either some random NPR station on or perhaps one of those stations-that-used-to-exist, a commercial station that played something other than the three or four genres of music that are extremely "commercial" at any given time.

And a song came on. I knew, even then, it was from a "musical comedy." That being one of the genres of music my parents liked and listened to (I grew up thinking everyone's parents listened to Beethoven and Mozart around the house, and had records of things like "The Student Prince" and "The Gondoliers."

Anyway - the song struck me, because even at that fairly young age (I couldn't have been more than 10 or so) I was aware of some of the perils of falling in love (in fact, I may have been just about 10, just about the time of my first "boyfriend," a fellow in my homeroom class. We didn't Go With people in that day, but I will say that what we did when we talked or worked together on projects could I suppose have been construed as flirting - and was, at least by some people, considering we got some teasing). But anyway. A line of the song kept coming back, circling back, year after year, and I always thought, "I should try to sing that for someone who knows music, and then they can tell me where it's from."

It's:

"Look at what it did to Bonaparte
He lost his head when he lost his heart
If he kicked over the apple cart
What chance have I
An ordinary guy
What chance have I with love?"

Well, I thought of it again today. And I realized, I need not even try to sing it. So I typed in "lost his head when he lost his heart" and boom, there it was.

Even now, I still like the song. And I still feel that there's some fundamental truth to it - but that that truth extends to women, as well as men, on the precariousness of giving one's heart...