As I've previously mentioned, I have a thing for musicals that, like most of my early musical education, comes from my dad. He would regularly watch film musicals on TV and take us to many West End shows. 'A Chorus Line', however, was not one of them - both my parents loved it but I guess that the subject matter was not appropriate for their kids. This did not preclude them from playing the soundtrack in the car and the reason that this song in particular is a Guilty Pleasure stems from one particular incident.
It was my friend Simon's bar-mitzvah and my dad had been asked to give 2 girls from school a ride to and from the function. Although I knew these girls, they were not part of my social circle. Anyway, en route my dad decides that we need some music, grabs the 'A Chorus Line' soundtrack and first song on side 2 starts: Dance: Ten; Looks: Three. Now for the uninitiated, this song is about a female dancer who is not getting any job offers and thus has some, um, surgical enhancements and it has a chorus that mostly utilizes the phrase 'Tits & Ass'. Well, this hormonal adolescent just about died and wished the car seat would swallow him up whole! We never spoke about this again...
Bonus Fact: When 'A Chorus Line' debuted, this song was not getting the audience reaction the creators had anticipated. They realised that it had been printed in the playbill under it's original title 'Tits & Ass' and therefore the audience has been expecting the setup! (Another example of this is in the mostly obscure Heather Brothers musical 'A Slice Of Saturday Night' where the song 'P.E.' has nothing to do with Physical Education...)
While Pamela Blair's original performance on the cast recording is stellar, here she is from the original Off-Broadway run at The Public Theater in 1975. The song actually starts at 2:45; the video quality is awful but the audio is amazing for being almost 50 years old (Note: NSFW lyrics obviously).
Bonus Clip: Here's Audrey Landers performing the same song in the fairly awful 1885 movie version of "A Chorus Line'
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