Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh my...

The Wizard of Oz

When Dorothy confronts the menacing lion with the fuss he makes over being slapped on the nose, he confesses his shame at being a hopeless wimp in prose and in song, sung to the tune of "If I Only Had a Brain" and "If I Only Had a Heart."  The Lion sings, "If I only had the nerve." Dorothy sings, "If the wizard is a wizard who will serve.

The Scarecrow sings, "Then I'm sure to get a brain."

Tin Man sings, "a heart."

Dorothy sings, "a home."

The Cowardly Lion sings, "the nerve."

The Lion's introduction to the movie is preceded by a memorable choirs that begins with a line of concern and grows with each increasingly hurried step as it is repeated by the Tin Woodman, Dorothy and the Scarecrow... "Lions, and tigers and bears, oh, my!"

Murder in Greenwich

The trick here is to find more than one lion, tiger and bear in the movie and something they all have in common that brings them together with an expression of "Oh my!" Tall order? Not when you have  a picture of Martha's cat Tiger, a stuffed toy tiger on a bedside table, some Teddy bears on a pillow and what you see Martha do on the bed. It's all in how you say what you see. You see her lie on it. Then there's this exchange between Martha and Michael at poolside shortly after Lucy's pointed allusion to the "lion of the senate," Ted Kennedy, charged with behaving cowardly in a drowning.

Martha: My friends thought I'd be too nervous to come speak to you.

Michael: Why would you be nervous?

Martha: I'm not (a few more awkward words on Martha's part then turning away in embarrassment to return to her friends): Oh, my god!

The common denominator is Dorothy Moxley's daughter Martha.