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<p>"Feed the Birds" is a song written by the Sherman Brothers (Richard M. Sherman &amp; Robert B. Sherman) and featured in the 1964 motion picture Mary Poppins. The song speaks of an old beggar woman (the "Bird Woman") who sits on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, selling bags of breadcrumbs to passers-by for tuppence a bag so that they can feed the many pigeons which surround the old woman. (The scene is reminiscent of the real-life seed sellers in Trafalgar Square.) It is reputed to have been Walt Disney's favorite song. In the book, Mary Poppins accompanies the children, on the way to tea with their father, to give money to the bird woman to feed the birds. In the movie, on the way to the bank, their father discourages the children from feeding the birds, while Mary Poppins, who had sung the song to the children the previous night, was on her day off. Academy Award winner Jane Darwell played the Bird Woman, her last screen appearance. In contrast to the energetic nature of most of the film's songs, "Feed the Birds" is played in a reverent tempo. This most serious of songs is used to frame the truly important moments in a film that is mostly humorous and lighthearted. It is used in four places: The first appearance is in the orchestral segment at the beginning of the film's overture medley, thus starting the overture slowly. The overture then segues into some of the faster pieces in the film's score. The second appearance comes when Mary Poppins sings the song to the children as a sweet lullaby on the night before their trip to the bank. It begins with Mary showing them a water-filled globe of St. Paul's, whose "snowflakes" are in the shape of the many birds flying around the cathedral. While the children sit and listen with rapt attention, scenes cut away to dreamlike imagery of the cathedral and of the bird woman, with parts of the song accompanied by an off-screen choir and orchestra. The third appearance is the evening of the trip to the bank, a very short segment about half a minute before the other sweeps appear in the chimney sweep sequence. The fourth appearance is also during the same evening, a dramatic orchestral and choral rendition, as a sombre and thoughtful Mr. Banks walks to his place of employment, literally and figuratively alone in the streets of London, stopping by the place where the bird woman was earlier that day, only to find it vacant before continuing on to the bank to face its board of directors to be fired. The scene is deliberately designed to suggest the bird woman may have died, and is one of the most dramatic scenes in the film. It segues into a short dirge-like segment as Mr. Banks reaches the door. The song is also alluded to in the Disney film Enchanted, a tribute and parody to classic Disney movies, in the form of an old woman named Clara who sells bird feed for "two dollars a bag", and in Chris Columbus's 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York by the character known as the Pigeon Lady (interpreted by Academy-Award Winner Brenda Fricker) and John Williams's soundtrack theme. As the Sherman Brothers recall, when Richard Sherman first played and sang "Feed the Birds" to Pamela Travers (the author of the Mary Poppins books), she thought it was "nice" but inappropriate for a male voice. Robert Sherman then called in a Disney staff secretary to demonstrate the song again. Upon hearing a woman sing the song, Ms. Travers' response was that she thought "Greensleeves" (traditionally in E-minor, the same key as about half of "Feed The Birds") was the only truly appropriate song for the soundtrack, as it was "quintessentially English". (Ms. Travers had originally wanted the only music in the film to be Edwardian period songs.) Eventually and reluctantly, Ms. Travers acquiesced to the American songwriters' supplying the film's now-classic mid-twentieth century soundtrack.</p>