Hold on, hold on

Many, many things are wrong with my assumptions about the song “Oh, Sherrie.” For one thing, it just took several fruitless minutes of Googling “oh sherri foreigner” to come to the realization that it’s in fact sung by Journey frontman Steve Perry. Those two groups are forever entwined and indistinguishable in my head.

Second of all, there are many ways to spell Sherry. Or Sherri. Or Cheri. But Sherrie? Really?

Third of all, and this is more a side comment than a mis-assumption, Steve Perry was for a long time my walking mnemonic device for remembering Joe Perry’s first name, because I knew that there couldn’t be two Steves in Aerosmith. Of course, now there are no Steves in Aerosmith … so sad.

Fourth of all, upon hearing the chiming intro notes of this song, I was immediately transported to 1986, when I was in sixth grade — I saw gray suede boots and feathered hair and tight pants in various shocking hues — and yet the song was released in 1984.

Hmph. My AutoTunes defilibramator must need an adjustment.

I know that I’ve got issues

Okay, I’m a little bit pained to be blogging about a song called “My Life Would Suck Without You,” but I heard it THREE SEPARATE TIMES during my short commute today, and I’ll be damned if I can get it out of my head.

As it happens, I read about this song before I ever heard it, and I heard the “Glee” kids do it before I experienced the K. Clarkson original, so I not only have no real memories of the song, I barely have first-hand knowledge of it. When I first read its title in a magazine or Web review somewhere, I groaned at its cheesiness and prepared to despise the thing on principle.

But, of course, it’s Kelly, and it’s insanely catchy, and every time I hear it I think about the final scene of the first season-ette of “Glee” and am filled with swoony delight.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know, it’s all a big Fox conspiracy, with the ”Glee” and the Clarkson and the “American Idol,” but I don’t care. I love that show (“Glee,” I mean; somehow have never watched the “Idol”) and can’t wait for it to come back.

It’s possible I watched the last-episode-til-April again on Sunday night. Whilst the rest of America watched the Super Bowl. IT IS HIGHLY POSSIBLE.

In certain circles

I’m a fairly sarcastic and ironic person, I guess, but I’m wondering if that sense of humor was always mine or if it only developed in my teens. Maybe this is true for everyone — do children have a sense of irony?

Anyway, I like the sarcasm, I like the irony, and I DEFINITELY like the word play, but there’s at least one instance in which all these things went right over my head — and kind of irreversibly keep doing so, even to this day.

I’m speaking of John Waite’s “Missing You,” a song I heard this morning and think of as a “rainy day song” — one of those I don’t particularly like, kind of nondescript and omnipresent, somehow bound to be played by a deejay while I was stuck on a long car ride on a rainy afternoon. Until the “Shut UP, Stevie!” years, I’d have classified most of Fleetwood Mac’s oeuvre as rainy day music, for instance.

To this day, I very clearly remember being at summer camp around the time this song came out, when I was nine or ten, feeling homesick and thinking I’d be clever to write to my parents with the lyrics changed to “I AM missing you,” instead of “I ain’t.”

Now … right. That is dumb and not at all clever — I get that now. The lyrics are ironic, he’s saying he ain’t missing you but really he is, so my youthful attempt at word play was not only ridiculous but self-defeating. Way to go, TGOTS.

Still, I kind of like knowing that I was fooling around with language even at that early age, and even now I remember the feeling of being young and away from home, rehearsing letters to my parents in my head, whenever I hear “Missing You.” There’s a random corner of my brain that still tries to change the “ain’t” into an “am.”

All that happens very quickly, of course, because I pretty much change the channel as soon as I hear that song. I ain’t liking it at all.

We’ll have ourselves a ball

For me, AC/DC ranks among those bands I once, at a tender young age, found threatening as hell. Now I get a kick out of their hamminess — the schoolboy outfits, the raunchy lyrics, the wonderful headbanginess of it all.

When we was coming up, the big hit of the moment was “You Shook Me All Night Long.” But the really good stuff, I think, came out in the Seventies. Which means my education has been retroactive.

All of this is a roundabout way of arriving at my office in Boston, circa 1999. I worked for a company housed in a series of three old brick brownstones on Beacon Hill, a warren of offices created from what must have been lovely living quarters. Our space, for instance, had a fireplace and a marble wall. I always wondered about the history and secrets that place held.

My office was enormous, for a junior staffer, and it had a sort of hotel-suite-style door that opened into the office of my boss. I would have left that door closed, but she liked leaving it open, and as a result we ended up exchanging all manner of random thoughts, dreams, and commentary during our workdays. She was about 35 at the time, red-haired, vivacious, a health nut, but hilarious.

Shortly after I started the job, my other boss, then in her early 40s, called from a vacation in Maine to report that she was getting remarried; upon hanging up, my boss spun around in her chair to tell me the news. “They grow up so fast,” I tut-tutted, testing to see if I could make her laugh. I could, and for the next couple of years we shared everything through that door.

Significant things, like love interests and career aspirations. Floopy things, like the dreams we’d had the night before. And silly things, like the fact that her friend was convinced that the lyrics to “Dirty Deeds” — a song I didn’t admit that I didn’t know — were “dirty jeans, dungarees.”

After two years, my boss shifted to a more private office and I shifted into hers. I closed that door. After two more years, she moved West and worked remotely, a challenging situation that led me to speak ill of her at times, but taught me a lot.

Now it’s been nearly six years since we stopped working together. We’re occasionally in touch — we met up at a baseball game when I lived out West, and I went to her wedding when she did finally find the fella of her dreams. But we’re drifting in different streams, as happens in life. Sometimes I wish we still had (watch out now here comes an ending that’s just too much) that door to each other’s souls.

My new Fridays

Astute observer(s) have probably noticed that MK posts are spotty to intermittent on Fridays now. That’s because I’m home with Junior — a situation that utterly delights me, but for the interruption to my regularly scheduled blogging.

Today’s post, therefore, is short and sweet (and not even all that sweet). It’s just that I heard that Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones is going into rehab. And then I heard his age, 62. And then not only did I marvel at the fact that they are still up there doing what they love, I marveled at the fact that he’s the same age as my fella’s mother.

Who is decidedly not taking the stage every night, whiskey bottle in hand. But it was a fun image for a second there.

Melting like a snowflake

Out of nowhere this morning, I was once again reduced to a weeping mess by a song on the radio.

I was about three stoplights from my job when my scan hit “Waltz of the Snowflakes,” from The Nutcracker, on the radio. Of all things — “Waltz of the Snowflakes.” I recognized the music in a split second, two notes from the bit with the boys’ choir splitting me open and pushing the tears right out of my eyes. It was a shockingly swift punch in the gut — from listening to weeping in the blink of an eye.

And I can’t rightly tell you why that is, and sort of don’t even want to — it was a moment of such pure feeling, a wholly visceral response, and not about thinking or analyzing at all (except brief confusion at the somewhat out-of-season tune). But of course, it’s about my love for The Nutcracker, my memories of performing it and running around the cavernous auditorium where we put it on with my little ballet friends; it’s about feeling like Christmas got away from me this year, since I maybe fulfilled my annual ritual of playing the Nutcracker music once, instead of millions of times; and it’s about remembering the years when my baby brother was little and adorable and sang the “Waltz of the Snowflakes” part with his boys’ choir, and being sad that he’s now all grown up and lives too far away.

I mean, I guess that’s what it’s all about. I wasn’t thinking all of that this morning, but those are the things that likely brought tears down my face.

On the one hand, I don’t relish starting the morning in such a maudlin way. On the other, I LOVE the power of music to so immediately and suddenly evoke feeling and memory.

Of course, I also love music when it’s simple silly goodness. MK, you will enjoy knowing that when I resumed my scan this morning, still wiping away the tears, I actually stumbled upon a country station. And it was there I learned that tequila makes her clothes fall off.

Your thoughts have taken their toll

You know, sometimes I really wonder why no one has yet realized what a genius I am.

I mean, I’ve been saying for years that those Green Day boys are secretly Broadway stars. I’ve been saying it in the attitude of an old-timey “Kid, I’m gonna make you a STAAHHR” Hollywood magnate with a cigar hanging out the corner of my mouth, swearing that their brand of hyper-melodic, pseudo-punky pop had the BROADWAY STAGE written all over it.

And now look what’s happening. Someone else took my bright idea and ran with it.

Dagnabbit. I really need to start acting like an old-timey Hollywood magnate in real life, rather than just in my head.

Just a man and his will to survive

When I was seven, my bestest friend and her brother exposed me to the iconic movies of the day — though I had no idea until years later.

First, there was “Eye of the Tiger,” which BFF’s brother played on the piano. He couldn’t possibly have been plunking it out every time I stayed at her house, but it felt that way, and I’ve come to think of it as the theme song for those years. I had little inkling that the song was popular, or that it had Rocky connections.

Their other obsession was Star Wars. Well, that’s how they knew it. I knew it as “this weird game they play where they call each other Puke Skywalker and Princess Leia.” There were dolls — excuse me, action figures — and ships and things that blipped and beeped. But I honestly believe I had no idea there were movies connected to these toys and games. It was not until years later that I put it together. Mostly when they got into their Puke/Leia roleplaying, I just smiled and tried not to look too lost. (It’s delicious, of course, that I turn out to have a fella who remains, at the tender age of 35, obsessed with SW.)

Anyhow. This BFF and her family moved away in 1983, shortly after all this important pop cultural stuff was going on. Her father got a job in D.C. when we were in third grade, and she asked to be allowed to tell me herself. She chose to do it by way of a spelling test, and I have a crystal clear memory of the moment I finally understood her subtle clues, which had been building from Word One. “Fields,” she said. “Fields. We passed many fields on the way to Washington.” Ooh, you’re going on a trip! I exclaimed. Well, sort of, she responded, and spilled the news.

It was heartbreaking. By age 8, we’d had enough adventures together that I could fill this whole blog with misty watercolored memories. We were inseparable. I thought life was over right then and there.

We’re still in touch, and our lives have unfolded along amazingly similar paths: careers, hobbies, hair lengths … we even gave birth within two weeks of each other. It’s a little spooky. I’ll have to ask her if the strains of Survivor bring her back to those days too.

A little kiss is all she needs

Many a morning, I feel a beat of guilt as I scoot past the country stations on my dial. I don’t think TGOTS and I have dedicated more than one or two entries to country music in the six months we’ve been doing this, which hardly seems fair to the genre. Unfortunately, my appreciation for country came at a relatively advanced age. Most of my early associations with it, which would theoretically provide fodder for posts, are actually of … scanning past it on car trips.

“Ieuw, country!” I would moan as I turned the dial to escape the twangy voices and plucky guitars. Later, I went through a phase of intentionally landing on country stations to entertain my mother (the usual driver on said trips). Together we’d laugh at the earnest, sad songs with the ridiculous lyrics. I’d put on my best southern accent, attempting to give a whiff of authenticity to my mockery.

But that was hardly fair to country music, which grew from real pain, and which has spun out decades of powerful music as a result.

These days, there are country singers I flat-out love: Patsy Cline. Johnny Cash. Willie Nelson. Emmylou Harris (does she count?). But I don’t hear that stuff too often on my commute, and Nu Country still makes me cringe a bit.

Still, I’ll admit there are newer songs that get me to stop the radio: “She’s Gone Country” by Alan Jackson being a prime offender. “All Summer Long” by, ahem, Kid Rock. Even when I stop without knowing the song, it usually ends up sucking me in. Today’s piece of dreck, a tribute to motherhood called “She’s Somebody’s Hero,” had me in tears by the time I pulled in the driveway.

Maybe country is something you can’t appreciate until you’ve lived long enough to have a few battered hound dogs and painful experiences of your own. Or maybe I’ve just … gone country.

Groovin’ with some energy

1. May I just say that I am pretty well over this whole driving to work in the dark thing? Dear Winter, please start being brighter earlier, and do not imagine I am ungrateful for the later sunshiney hours you are already keeping.

2. May I also just pause for a commercial break and say that my new favorite thing is these herbal lozenges? I seem to have developed my mother’s perpetual tickly throat, which activates the moment I get in the car in the morning. So each day, as I enjoy my morning scan, I am also sucking on one of these little buggers. Love ‘em.

3. Finally, may I ask who the people are who turn pop songs into marching band music? What a soul-crushing job that must be. I can just imagine armies of formerly earnest music majors, initially thrilled to be working in the industry of their choosing, ultimately beaten down by the soulless drudgery of turning good music into something to be destroyed by brace-face high schoolers.

I was thinking about this while driving to work this morning, as “Funkytown” came on the radio. I can’t hear this song — the Lipps Inc or the Pseudo Echo version — without seeing the little rectangle of second trumpet sheet music, wrinkled at the corners and propped against a piece of cardboard in my lyre (sp?). I cringe even now remembering the lack of funk we gave to that song, forcing all syncopation out of the beat, pummeling it into  4/4 time. Ours was NOT a funky town.

I’m totally writing a novel about the people who turn real music into high school band music. That’d be an awesome job for a fictional protagonist.