My Girl's from Titsworth

Now the whole world knows “The Titsworth Song.” Or at least a snippet of it. On September 25 six members of the student a cappella singing group Res Miranda appeared on the ABC daytime TV talk show, “The View,” honoring co-host/birthday girl Barbara Walters with one of the verses of the old SLC standard.

The six—Mike LeVasseur ’04, Julia Barenboim ’04, Frank Griggs ’03, Naomi Finkelstein ’05, Sarvani Prasad ’03 and Guinnevere Hand-Boniakowski ’02—were whisked by an early-morning stretch limo to ABC’s Manhattan studios. After make-up and rehearsal, they donned oversized “Happy Birthday Barbara” T-shirts and sang a bouncy verse that Walters herself knows by heart:

“My girl’s from Titsworth,
she’s really down to earth.
You get your money’s worth
from progressive education!”

When Walters borrowed the microphone from LeVasseur and led the group in three turns through the verse, her delight was evident.

“This was TV. I thought Barbara would’ve figured it out by then, but she kept asking us, ‘Are you really from Sarah Lawrence? Are you really going to sing?’” says Barenboim. “I think she was honestly happy that we were there.”

Walters has waxed reminiscent (and often comic) about her undergrad days in Titsworth and even sang the same verse once before on the show. That videotape allowed LeVasseur to create an arrangement the afternoon before the show. “I arranged three choruses,” he says, “the first in unison, the second with a bass harmony and the third in four-part harmony.”

“It was fun to be on TV,” he adds, “and have people I haven’t seen in three years calling up, e-mailing me…”

Res Miranda (“miraculous thing” in Latin) has about a dozen members and performs about 10 times a year at SLC, singing folk, pop, international music and classical songs.