The Bell Curve:

Every so often, our ethical convictions get challenged by prospects so attractive that we can rationalize stretching them just this once.

That happened to me last weekend, and my character failed the test — as I’m reminded every time the planes take off from John Wayne Airport over my house.

The main reason that is happening is an opaque entity called the Great Park that was sold to voters with millions of bucks raised by Irvine to displace the commercial airport ideal for that space.

I’ve had to bite that bullet, so my only satisfaction has come from helping to keep the public informed as green is swallowed up by private development and new deals replace old deals with PR hyperbole.

In that state of mind, I was introduced by one of my former students to a schedule of 17 summer concerts and dance parties produced by the Irvine Barclay Theatre for the Great Park.

The only charge is eight bucks for parking. That was tempting — especially when I saw the impressive list of headliners — but not tempting enough to get me to the mythical park until he threw in the clincher.

The attraction last Friday night was Pete Jacobs and His Wartime Radio Revue, with a genuine Big Band playing the music that followed us to war in the 1940s.

I was hooked.

One of the blessings I give thanks for daily is having shared this planet with the Big Bands. They had a short life here, from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. They were at full flower when we entered World War II and never reached that plateau again. War casualties decimated almost every band, most notably when the plane carrying Capt. Glenn Miller disappeared over the English Channel.

Never again were the dance halls at the lakes surrounding my Indiana home filled nightly with the bands of Miller, the Dorsey brothers, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Artie Shaw and dozens of other high-quality bands playing one-nighters and then boarding a bus for the next stop at the next lake on the next night. The cost to attend was minimal, keyed to the pre-war Depression. For 50 cents, you could see Benny Goodman twice nightly on a vaudeville stage with a movie in between.

But mostly we connected with the Big Bands in the dance halls, where the crowd was usually evenly divided between listeners, posted a few feet away from their idols, and dancers, high on the heady spirits of swing.

Crowd attention in those days was always more on the musicians than the singers, many of whom were to become famous in Hollywood.

The Big Bands served as proving grounds for — among many others — the likes of Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Dick Haymes and, of course, Frank Sinatra, sitting on side chairs and getting up to sing a chorus or two, especially of the ballads.

In what I recall as my last junior prom at the University of Missouri before going off to war in 1942, the band making the music was Tommy Dorsey, and the lead singer was Sinatra.

All these memories played back vividly Friday when the Wartime Radio Revue took the bandstand and “String of Pearls” — or was it “In the Mood”? — blasted out and nirvana set in.

Quickly, the dancers took over, atop what had once been a runway for military aircraft. I was astonished at their skill and versatility — and especially at their relative youth. I’m so accustomed to seeing old folks like me reliving this piece of personal history that I almost felt resentful at seeing it taken over by the young, at least until I was able to rejoice that my music is not going to be lost in the generations since I lived it.

Two days later, at the risk of overkill, I had this lesson impressed again, this time at the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach, where the focus was on a musical tribute to Frank Sinatra called “My Way.” If the singers were garnish in the Wartime Radio Revue, they were decidedly the main course — along with the songs identified with Sinatra — in “My Way.”

Swing dancing on a crowded floor is highly physical, while Sinatra ballads are very much one-on-one in both sound and lyrics. The audience was also quite different. One of the actors caught us pretty accurately when he said that a lot of our children must have been conceived to a Sinatra ballad. My daughter, sitting next to me, poked me in the ribs to make sure I heard.

One of the more useless things at which I excel is bringing up instantly the lyrics to what must be hundreds of popular songs graven into my head mostly in my youth. They were the songs Sinatra sang, and I had a terrible time in that theater Sunday restraining myself from joining in. So I’m still awash in my music as I write this, and I heartily recommend both shows if they appear in these parts again.

Meanwhile, the Park (I just can’t get that other word out) will be host to five more weekend dance parties and five concerts, featuring music from Iran to Hawaii, to close out the summer — all to be played out in the enduring echo of the Big Bands.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.