Happy birthday, you wonderful old man!

I hope you read this thread and enjoy this story: I grew up in, at first, barely-post-colonial West Africa, speaking mostly French although my family was American. My parents had several of your children's records, including the Concert at Town Hall that starts off with Little Birdie. We also played Mah Jongg (the *real* game that's played kinda like rummy), whose "ace of spades" or 1 Bamboo is usually depicted as a peacock, which we often called the Bird. We would often carol out Little birdie, little birdie when discarding the 1 Bam.

Fast forward to, oh, last year or so. We have all long left Africa but kept playing Mah Jongg - I taught all my college and grad school friends, and all of my niblings' (siblings' kids) and my kids (aged 25-10) all also play fluently. In fact, the 20-somethings have managed to invent a drinking game around it, and we always have at least one ongoing table when we get together, with the players switching in and out as other fun stuff occurs, but as it takes only 3 or 4 to play, there is always a game going. Well, one day I sang out Little Birdie, Little Birdie as I was discarding, which seemed completely normal to me, but at the reaction of my rather tipsy niblings (who found that, coming out of the blue as it were, hysterical) realized (shock!) that we hadn't done that in so long, these poor kids had grown up without knowing your children's songs!

Needless to say, that situation has been rectified, and thanks to modern technology I've bought a ton of your songs on MP3, and now we play them when we get together. And discarding the Bird is now a Social instead of just a Drink in the game.

So from Mom, her 4 daughters and 8 grandchildren (4 twins 4 not 4 boys 4 girls 4 teens 4 not): we love you. We are so happy and grateful that you seem to have no intention of stopping singing.