In case there was any doubt about why I like Lady Gaga

There was a conversation sometime in the past year in Hollywood that I wish I could have heard. I don't know how the organization of the Academy Awards show takes place, but it must involve several meetings over the preceding year. At one of those they decide what musical numbers will be part of the program and who will provide the music. At the meeting I am wishing I had attended, the group decided since this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the movie "The Sound of Music," songs from that one should be included. The part I wanted to hear was how they decided who would sing the songs.

I can picture several names  being tossed around but none of them generating much excitement. Then someone suggested, "how about Lady Gaga?" Imagine the gasps around the table at that idea. Lady Gaga? "Sound of Music?" But someone must have persisted. Perhaps there was a request for an example from the artist. Somehow despite some probable resistance, the idea grew into reality.

The ads for the show and even her tweets about rehearsals gave no clue what she was going to sing in the show.

It came as a bit of a shock when they introduced her and identified what she was going to sing. It has been a treat over the past couple of years as she and Tony Bennett began to collaborate and then earlier last year released an album of popular swing and jazz songs from the past, the kinds of music Bennett sang his whole career. So I thought, what the heck, let's see what she does with "Sound of Music."

I wanted to say she rocked it, but that doesn't quite address the music itself. What she did was own it. No Gaga gimmicks, no outrageous costume, no fancy arrangement to bend the music to her own will, she sang it all straight, and powerfully and beautifully. She owned it.

When she spread her arms with the last note, the auditorium was deadly silent, I think stunned, and then all of Hollywood gave her a standing ovation. As the applause dwindled Julie Andrews herself, who sang those songs in that movie 50 years earlier came out onto the stage. Seventy-nine years old, her voice destroyed by a surgery, she appeared to be on the verge of tears as she walked straight to Gaga and hugged her hard.

The Lady departed the stage, leaving Julie Andrews to speak to the crowd and the first thing she said was an appreciation for the way she just heard her own music sung by someone else.

I can honestly say a few years ago when I first encountered her, I sort of saw this coming. I thought at the time as I came to appreciate her music that she was destined for a Broadway musical, not exactly "The Sound of Music," but close. And it was kind of cool to see a tattooed rock and roller, take on more traditional music from the past and pay the homage at the same time making the songs her own for a time. They will always belong to Julie Andrews, but for one night they lived in another singer's voice.

And once again that singer took on yet another genre of music and amazed her audience with a talent that continues to stretch the limits, her own and then again the ones we in the audience foolishly saddle her with.

Smoke screens, bad love and Lady Gaga

Define music

Take a sad song and make it better

The Lady and Maria

 The Gaga is a Lady   saw her in person

God, cancer, a hairdresser and Gaga

The definition of cool

Fair and fall  – Gaga and the woodpile