KEEP SMILING [Intro] Good morning, happy citizens! The sun begins to rise! By civic proclamation, there'll be gladness in all eyes. Adjust your faces upward. Let the corners reach the skies. The Office of Wellbeing thanks you. Noncompliance is unwise. [Verse 1] It's a beautiful day to be beaming, and the law is on your side. Every doorway, every window, wears a smile a mile wide. There's a quota on your cheekbones, there's a tax upon the frown, and the inspectors stroll the avenue and write the gloomy down. So lift it, friend, and lock it, make it permanent and proud, for a face without a smile on it is simply not allowed. [Pre-Chorus] But should you slip, should you sag, should the sparkle leave your stare, there's a friendly little building just behind the public square. They will help you find your happy. They are patient. They are kind. And nobody has ever left there with a frown still on their mind. [Chorus] Keep smiling! (Keep smiling!) Show your teeth and hold it tight! The Bureau's only restful when the whole street's beaming bright! Keep smiling! (Keep smiling!) For the frown's a fineable crime, and the ones who can't remember get to learn it one more time! Keep it sunny, keep it pleasant, keep it pretty, keep it sweet, for the discipline of gladness has a schoolroom on your street! [Verse 2] Now the Hendersons were sullen, and they would not catch the mood, so a cheerful van collected them for corrective gratitude. They returned within the fortnight, and you'd hardly know the pair — how they beam now, how they sparkle, how they thank you for the care! There were stripes across their reasoning the day they came back glad, but the corners stayed obedient, and that's all the Bureau had. Oh, the body learns its manners when the lesson's bright and clear, and the slowest pupil graduates with gratitude and fear. [Pre-Chorus] So if your heart's not in it, if your smile begins to ache, hold the line a little longer, for your own dear safety's sake. The instrument is gentle. The instructors only care. And the cheer you cannot summon, they'll be glad to put it there. [Chorus] Keep smiling! (Keep smiling!) Let it stretch from cheek to cheek! The frown is for the foolish and the obstinate and weak! Keep smiling! (Keep smiling!) Till it aches behind your eyes — for the ones who stop are noticed, and the noticed win a prize. [Bridge] And the children in the schoolyard wear their grins like little wounds, and they smile into their pillows, and they smile through empty rooms, not because the morning's golden, not because the world is kind, but because they learned what happens to the smile you leave behind. There's a man who's beamed for thirty years and cannot feel his face, and a woman grinning rigid in a sunlit, silent place — and the Bureau calls it happiness. And the posters call it pride. But a smile that's only terror is a scream you've learned to hide. Wider. Wider. Always wider. Don't you stop. [Final Chorus] Keep smiling! (Keep smiling!) Show your teeth and hold it tight! The Bureau's only restful when the whole street's beaming bright! Keep smiling! (Keep smiling!) Through the ache and through the tears, for the lesson's only over when you've grinned away the years! So grin and grin and grin until there's nothing left inside, we correct the joyless gently, and the gentle ones have died — [Outro] A coil of leather resting on a sunlit hook. A row of golden faces in the civic photo book. A child alone at midnight, grinning at the wall, afraid to be the only one who isn't. Wider. Then nothing at all.
