You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2009.
In the small town where I grew up, we had a weekly paper. It couldn’t have been more than 10 or 12 pages, but boy was it packed with everything you needed to know. Marriage announcements, school lunch menus, new hours for the general store, obituaries, nature notes … and more.
In one issue, when I was in high school, there appeared a thank-you notice from a local parent. “How do you thank someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume? It isn’t easy, but I’ll try,” began the note. My mother and I, both avid readers of the paper (she its former editor), discussed it later. “What has she, lost her mind?” we said. “What the hell does that mean?”
Clearly neither of us was familiar with “To Sir, with Love” — I know I wasn’t, and if my mother ever had been she’d forgotten it two decades on. So we didn’t catch the reference to the lyrics, and it wasn’t until years later that I heard the song — “oh my god, did she just say crayons to perfume?”
My thoughts upon hearing it this morning went down another path as well. It so happens that the author of said thank-you notice was the mother of a boy who Liked Me in high school. (Did I say “a” boy? I mean “the” boy. There were not hordes.) And it so happens that I dreamed about him last night. (The Girl on the Swing will have a good laugh at this, because she thinks I dream about people from high school every night. It’s not true!)
In last night’s dream, I was with Said Boy. I was in a wedding dress. We were not together, but we were having a lovely visit. I was happy. I said to him, “I wish I’d been this confident and happy when you liked me!” He told me how he’d married, then remarried. We had a warm and friendly chat.
It’s so emotionally retarded of me to still be processing this after eighteen years. I know. I know! Part of it is guilt — because as a cripplingly shy high-schooler, my solution to dating anxiety was cold, cruel behavior. And I always wish I could apologize.
It’s dumb, teenagers do dumb things, everyone survives, etc. And since I can’t find him on Facebook (what? not that I tried!), I suppose I just need to move on. In the immortal words of the ever so aptly named Lulu, “It isn’t easy, but I’ll try.”
In this week’s Entertainment Weekly, one of the writers makes a weak joke about Britney Spears’ sparkly leotards having more charisma than she does these days. The jab seems made with some sadness—more regret at Britney being a shadow of what she once was, rather than cruelty toward the lackluster performer (and person) she now is.
I get the appeal of the Britney, and have enjoyed some of her tunes, but hasn’t she always been kind of a shadow of a performer—and a person? There was always something hollow in her eyes, something rote in her performance, just something missing. That’s to be expected, I suppose, of those brought up in the marketing/merchandising/Disneyfied machine, as she was. But even the dreaded Miley has a sparkle in her eyes. She’s a spoiled brat, but at least there’s evidence of some (idiotic, selfish, maniacal) wheels turning.
Britney could lip sync. She could perform choreography. She could whip her abs into presentable shape. But charisma? Soul? I could never see it.
It’s really, really sad that this is so, because she seems so obviously a person who has been robbed, in the most fundamental way, of LIFE. She seems drugged into obedience and oblivion. Just a soulless shell, poured into sparkly leotards or sexy schoolgirl outfits.
As “… Baby One More Time” played during my drive in this morning, I sat for a while at a long red light. It’s back to school day for some of the private schools in my area, and across the intersection I spied a girl in school uniform: white button-down shirt, blue pleated skirt, black maryjanes, backpack so big it seemed about to tip her over. The girl was probably six or seven years old, and she was bouncing up and down, big grin on her face, as she waited for the “walk” signal. As the light changed, she bounded across the street, jumping up on the curb with a little twirl, grinning all the while. Then I noticed that her father (presumably) had been waiting in his car to see her safely across the street. She waved at him, still bouncing, still grinning, and he waved back, a broad grin on his face as well.
It was adorable. Genuine and loving and full of life.
I come from the land Down Under. Where women roar? Roll? And men thunder! Can you hear can you hear the — wait, thunder? (Again? Whoops.) You better run, you better take cover.
This is one of the songs that transports me to the early ’80s, to being a child with two teenage sisters around. Sisters wearing those short gym shorts with the white piping (really, interwebs? on this of all things you are going to let me down?) and discussing crucial things like, “Did you know Vegemite is real? I swear! It’s a meat spread or something.”
Such wisdom one could glean from quietly lingering on the edges of teenage girldom. Much more there is to say about that, some other time.
Men at Work disappeared from my consciousness for twenty years or so, until Colin Hay showed up on “Scrubs” singing the painful and moving “Overkill” in one of the creepiest and best episodes ever. Renewed affection for Colin Hay — who is the same person as Colin Quinn in my mind, which makes me love him all the more — and renewed interest in the land Down Under.
I hope to get there someday. Or at least get my hands on a Vegemite sandwich.
I was in New Orleans this spring, and had the chance to attend one day of the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, aka Jazzfest. It. Was. Awesome.
We saw bluegrass and New Orleans jazz and funk and reggae and African dancers. The day was gorgeous and breezy and uncharacteristically, blessedly, not steamy. There were crowds, but everyone seemed to be in a festival mood, and the mass of humanity did not feel oppressive. The whole thing was just grand.
And friends, I discovered gospel music. We initially made our way to the gospel tent just to see what there might be to see, and I was so entranced I spent hours there. Now, I’m the Whitest of White Girls, but even I had heard gospel before, even live at an AME church. But the power of these massive gospel groups in New Orleans—groups of kids, groups of adults, all-female groups, all-male groups, mixes of age and gender—it was something special. I found tears streaming down my face from the sheer joy of the sound. Make a joyful noise, indeed.
There’s something about the communal, powerful sound of church singing that I find affecting me more and more in the last couple of years, and I’m not completely sure where that comes from. This past Christmas I was in the car and “Silent Night” came on the radio; I started to sing along, and almost immediately began to weep. A week or so later I went to a Christmas Eve service with some of my family, and the same thing happened. I have not felt overwhelmingly sad or joyful in these instances, I’ve just responded in a completely raw, untethered way.
I wonder if it might be the communal aspect of the music. I did have, for so much of my life, the enveloping goodness of the choir at my small-town church on Sundays, and endless singing at church camp in the summer. I did not then, and have not as an adult, thought much about what that music and spirit meant to me, but I think it must have meant something. And that something is missing in my present life. Must rectify that.
Oh yeah: Song for the day is “Higher Ground,” Red Hot Chili Peppers version. I could have told a story about how it’s one of the songs burned into my brain from my one awful experience with aerobics (PE credit in college), but that story consists of little more than “OMG I HATED AEROBICS IN COLLEGE.” Pluswhich Mama Kitt has already told a far better aerobics tale.
This morning, as I wearily climbed into the car to drive my weary (but on the mend) son to daycare, I put it on the classical station per usual. And there, quietly and politely playing, was Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.”
Besides being happy for the peace it brought, I was instantly transported to my sister’s wedding in 1994*. Much of my family is — nontraditional, shall we say? So of the six of us girls, only two have had the big, white-dress, pull-out-all-the-stops wedding.
Back in ’94 I was in college, doubting my own prospects of ever finding a soulmate (or even a mate, for that matter), and quite starstruck by my sister and her new husband. So grown-up, they were, so confident, so glamorous, so impossibly happy.
Even then, though, I wondered about the stately, quiet procession. Even now, in the car, I could feel and hear and see the quiet rustle of people in pews, the stifled throat-clears, the expectant neck-craning and misty eyes. At their wedding, at so many weddings. I never thought I wanted a wedding like that. My fantasy was always to come running down the aisle, perhaps with my nine nephews and one niece hooting and hollering all around me — really tear the place up.
But now that Jill and Kevin have made Challenging Wedding Convention the next big thing, I find I have a new appreciation for quiet, for tradition, for taking part in something that’s been done the same way for centuries for the very reason that it has.
I’m not saying that I’ll necessarily Bach my way down the aisle if my fella and I do get it together and get hitched one day. But there’s something about “aren’t we crazy!” being an internet sensation that just makes me want to be … polite.
*Erratum: My sister processed to “Sleepers, Wake,” another lovely Bach melody. I am a bad bridesmaid, even all these years later. Sorry S.
Dear Summer of 2009,
Enough.
Okay? Enough.
You have taken from us too many Major Figures in American Culture, and we can’t bear it any more. Farrah. MJ. John Hughes. Walter Cronkite. And then, just yesterday, Ted Kennedy, Dominick Dunne, and Ellie Greenwich (writer and producer of such girl-group classics as “Leader of the Pack,” “Be My Baby,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and “Then He Kissed Me”). It’s too much, Summer of 2009.
I can’t claim to have thought about any of these individuals on a regular basis—I can’t even claim to have known Ellie Greenwich’s name before yesterday. Yet their deaths hit as losses all the same, I suppose because each made a significant cultural impact in his or her own way. I do not want to imagine a world with no red-bathing-suit poster, no moonwalk, no classic teen comedies, no CBS gravitas, no stalwart Massachusetts liberals, no trashy Vanity Fair articles, no bouffanted girl groups.
It may be, too, that the losses can be chalked up to my established, encroaching old-fogey-dom, and that with each new obituary I feel a sense of “oh, there goes the last of the great statesmen / songwriters / broadcasters / moonwalkers / etc.”
I’m glad to know Ellie Greenwich’s name now, at least, because I do have this romantic idea of the Brill Building heyday, and do secretly (or not-so) wish I were in a girl group. Actually, Mama Kitt and another friend and I were once sort of in a girl group—we lip-synched as the Supremes at a junior high dance—and apparently I was cute enough in it that I caught the eye of a boy I’d go on to date in high school. And in grad school, girl groups played a key role in clarifying the argument of my dissertation. (I won’t bore you with how.) The opening scene of Adventures in Babysitting, where Elisabeth Shue lip-syncs to “Then He Kissed Me,” is burned into my brain. For a time, in a big empty room in my family’s big old house, I would recreate that scene with my boom box and a cassette tape for hours on end.
Ellie, Ted, other Major Figures in American Culture—we will miss you. Summer of 2009—enough, okay? Okay.
xoxo The Girl on the Swing
Billy is all yours! I haven’t heard him for weeks. Besides, he is “ours.” In all his gruesome glory.
What a bumpy stretch. Sick baby for five days — and just when the medication built up enough to start working, he turned out to be allergic to it. So we start all over. Meanwhile, my workplace has gone through major trauma — I’ve participated in the befuddled mass reaction in spurts, between doctor’s appointments. And today comes news of Ted Kennedy’s death, which — well, it was the well-heeled, square-jawed straw that broke this camel’s back. As I listened to the coverage on NPR early this morning, I initially found myself emotionless compared to some of the eulogizers. Then a soft, dirgey interlude came on, and I completely lost it.
That was around 9 a.m. — after I had freaked out about my son’s rash, snapping at my fella in uncharacteristic fashion, but before we took him to the doctor’s office. So later in the morning, on the short drive there, I put the radio on again — but instead of NPR, I opted to scan. And the first song that popped up was my latest obsession: “Escape (the Piña Colada Song),” by … Rupert Holmes (thanks again, Google).
Wee digression: This song is a great example of one I’ve heard a million times without paying any attention to the lyrics whatsoever — see Veronica. But a couple of weeks ago, I forced myself to focus beyond the oh-so-cheesy chorus — and was rewarded with the oh-so-cheesy tale of a lonely, bored man responding to a personal ad placed by his own loney, bored lady friend! They both like piña coladas! I told my fella that evening, and a couple of my sisters later in the week, that I had finally really heard the song — “Oh,” they all said, “you mean how the guy places the personal ad and then his wife responds to it?” Well yeah, basically. How am I the only person who …
Whatever. My point is not about lyrics this time, but about moments of joy. When the song came on, my son did his new little dance — kind of a head-bobbing, funky sway — and my fella, sitting with him in the back, joined in. I watched them in the rear-view mirror, bobbing my head to echo their pop-song pleasure as we drove along in the morning sunshine. One moment of happy harmony that I tucked away to get me through the rest of the week.
Here’s the thing:
Scarcely a day passes that I do not hear one Mr. William Joel whilst scanning on my way to work. Yet I cannot bring myself to write about him, more than to mention Innocent Man as being one of the first records I owned, because the first thing I think of when I hear a Billy Joel song is Mama Kitt. Not that there are no stories to tell about BJ and MK–ho ho, there are stories!–but I feel like she has dibs on him, and ought to do her thing before I do mine.
So there you go, Mama Kitt. Do they not play Billy Joel with the same frequency at your end of I-90? Are the stories just too big and too numerous to tackle? Hasn’t Billy had it hard enough of late, without you forsaking him too?
Bring it, Mama.
You know, Janis, I got to wondering if I would trade all of my tomorrows for one more yesterday with … well, anyone. And the answer was no. Is that just because I enjoy life too much? Am too curious about the future? Or is it that I’ve never experienced the kind of blue-jean passion you shared with B. McGee? Or was your flame burning out anyway so you figured what the hell? Or were you just prone to exaggeration?
And by you, of course, I mean Kris Kristofferson. I always have to train my mind to remember that he wrote the song, and then think about all the gender implications therein (it’s akin to Tiffany’s classic rework of “I Saw Her Standing There,” only not sucky), and by then the song is over and Bobby is off looking for love. And I hope s/he finds it.
