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Please, please, a-please please?
When I heard “Straight Up” this morning, I immediately did two things: perked up a bit (a welcome feeling, since Jr got me up at 5 a.m.), and then thought of a boy from high school.
As I listened, I realized that it’s actually Paula’s “Cold Hearted” that makes me think of the boy. But I’m going to proceed anyway, because either way it’s a ridiculous association.
This boy was a very tall, very smart boy who hailed from a family of very tall, very smart boys. He was forever tops in our class, and unfailingly kind and gentlemanly, and by all appearances entirely straight-laced. He was quiet, a lot of the time, but had a wicked sense of humor and a completely surprising giggle.
His brains and quiet got him picked on sometimes, even by we fellow eggheads, but I think there was always a sense of respect that told that scoffing to shut up and go sit in the corner. That happened in a very literal way when this boy asked me to march with him at our high school graduation. The pairing off of marchers ahead of graduation was akin to finding a prom date, in a weird way — there was lots of social pressure and whispering and so forth. I have this vague memory that when he asked me I ran out of the classroom laughing, went to the bathroom, then came back and very earnestly told him I’d be glad to. I certainly hope it didn’t happen that way.
The boy also ran track, and — alert, this is where the post is mildly relevant — one day on the bus on the way to a meet he delivered a very prim and proper version of “Cold Hearted” that still makes me laugh, all these years later.
And speaking of years later … at our ten-year high-school reunion, an event about which TGOTS and I haven’t written much, if anything, this boy had turned into a balding man. He was one of the first people I saw, and I was in reunion shock, and I blurted out, “You’re bald!” We spent a few minutes chatting, but that was difficult to recover from.
All this, plus the vague knowledge that his family life was touched by tragedy at least once and maybe more, leaves me with a feeling of warm concern, fondness, and mild shame. To be honest, I don’t know that we’d have that much to say to each other if we had the chance. But wherever he is, I hope he’s doing OK. And I hope once in a while he still busts out with a Paula Abdul impersonation.
Maybe I caught the MamaKitt’s memory of verbal you-know-what in awkward situations on Tuesday, because I had a wicked dumbass musical moment that afternoon. AND I AM HERE TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT NOW.
(And I’d be off-blog-topic in doing so, except for the part where I heard an ad for the concert that figures in my story on my way to work today. See? A SLIM THREAD OF RELEVANCE.)
On Tuesday my office did that thing that offices seem unable to help themselves from doing: going to lunch together. Awkwardness is INEVITABLE. We ALL KNOW IT. So why do people who work together insist on forcing social interaction? We barely talk at work — what are we going to talk about around a restaurant table?
Anyway, I was sitting awkwardly at this awkward lunch with my boss and the most annoying, incompetent person in our office, waiting for everyone else to arrive. Neither boss nor A-I person was making chitchat, so I worked my ass off keeping the ball rolling. The weather, the traffic — no topic was too inane.
Eventually I got us around to summer in our city, and fun things to do (not that I’d take advice on fun from either of these dudes). I have concert tickets for a show next week at a venue I’ve never been to, so I chatted up boss and A-I person about it. Boss actually knew the place quite well, and we killed a few moments on the topic.
Then we sat in silence. And I, for one, attempted to kill that time by focusing on the music playing in the restaurant. Once I realized what song was on, I said “Oh! These are actually the guys I’m going to see next week!”
My companions smiled wanly, not giving two shits about my little small talk story. Shortly thereafter, our other colleagues arrived. Shortly there-thereafter, I realized I’d told a big stinking fib.
Yeah, I was not hearing the band I’m seeing next week. I was hearing someone else entirely. Not only that, I was hearing someone who thought it would be good to drop an F bomb in the middle of their song. The song I’d just told my boss I liked.
Sigh. No way of getting out of that hole. “Gosh, boss, I was mistaken — the loudly cussing fellas on the radio right now are not actually the ones I like — sweartogod!” Nope. “Oh my oh my, boss, I didn’t realize there was a SWEAR in the middle of this tune!” No way.
Oh well. If I thought these dudes were even half listening to a word I’d been saying, I might fret more. But I’m thinking I’m in the clear.
Just STOOPID and in the clear.
Dudes, I am not even making this up: My daily scan is letting me legitimately talk about last night’s Glee.
Last night was the Lady Gaga episode, and this morning I came upon “Bad Romance.” Bad blogger that I am, I punched STOP to listen — even though I JUST wrote about the Gaga. But when the song ended, a deejay came on and was all “yep, they did Gaga on Glee last night; here’s one of the songs they did” — and played Lea Michele and Idina Menzel’s pared down duet of “Poker Face.”
At first I rolled my eyes at this piece. Why take all the fun out of a dance tune by slowing it way down and turning it into a lament rather than a celebration? Why waste two massively talented Broadway singers on a Gaga tune?
But then … I don’t know, it just got me. The moment was right for these two characters to sing a sad, slow duet; the recasting of the song made it really wonderfully painful and plaintive. I ended up feeling very moved by the moment, where I’d started out annoyed.
This shift happens more often than I’d like. I’m just so horribly judgmental — I react and make up my mind about things instantaneously more often than not, for good and for ill, and not infrequently have to adjust those initial judgements down the road. I need to remember to check myself, because this is not an attractive quality. Check myself before I wreck myself. Or before I get an impassioned lecture from Kurt’s Dad.
Also I can never remember if it’s “judgement” or “judgment.” Pfft.
I get irrationally mad at John Lennon for striking out on his own. I find a lot of his post-Beatles music self-indulgent. Even though I like songs like “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine,” my fondness for them is dulled by the image of him lounging in a bed, half-naked (I politely pull the sheet up for him), singing away and thinking, “Man, this is so much better than that lame music I was making before.”
Unlike so many others, I don’t particularly blame Yoko. I think John was full of himself from the start (though yes, a genius, and yes, I’m a dolt for criticizing someone who was brutally murdered).
Anyhow. I do enjoy one of my primary associations with “Give Peace a Chance,” which is the image of Paul Reiser and Yoko and Helen Hunt in bed together at the end of an episode of Mad About You. “Give peace a chance,” Yoko intones, and then, after an appropriate beat, Paul utters a too-perfect twist on one of the show’s catchphrases: “That’s all we’re saying.”
Man, I loved that show. It has not aged well. I saw it a year or two ago and it was difficult to endure. But at the time, they were exactly who I wanted to turn into. Urban, funny, loving people who helped each other through life’s ups and downs. Come to think of it, I haven’t done half bad.
Also: Hank Azaria! That’s all I’m saying.
OK, it is time to confess my worst-ever Billy Joel story: The time I spoke to him.
Old Billy made the rounds of college campuses in (Google pause) 1996 with a lecture called (Google cheat) “An Evening of Questions, Answers … and a Little Music.” Google further tells me that Billy’s appearance at my college was on February 29, Leap Day, which might explain the following events.
At that point in my life — second semester of senior year — I was enough over my family-inspired love of Billy Joel that I’m sure I mocked the very fact that I was going to his “lecture.” But I wasn’t enough over him to not go.
I rounded up a couple of agreeable friends and we squished into the balcony of an old, creaky auditorium named after the school’s founder. Billy took the stage and — I frankly have no idea what he talked about. I vaguely recall that he was funny at times, and tried to keep us focused on his burgeoning classical career, and played some samples of his new music, and then grudgingly took some questions about that grungy old beast known as rock ‘n’ roll.
For some reason, I got it in my head to ask him to do his Elvis impersonation. A few years earlier, he had recorded ["All Shook Up" and "Heartbreak Hotel" ... must I mention the G-word again?], so I knew he had it in him. And my friends and I had lately developed a semi-ironic obsession with Elvis, so it seemed like a perfect dovetailing of passions.
Here is what happens when MamaKitt decides to ask a question in a class or other public forum: Cheeks get hot. Heart pounds. Brain reviews, over and over again, how the question should be phrased, no this is how it should be phrased, and here’s how it might be received. Heart pounds some more. And ninety-two percent of the time, all this preparation leads to zero actual question-asking.
As it was in this case. The “lecture” ended, our fellow students spilled out into the night, and the moment had passed. Or had it?
I convinced my friends to circle around to the back of the auditorium, where we saw Billy’s sleek black car waiting for him and a small group of superfans clustered by the door. These girls were totally lame! I went and joined them, leaving my friends standing a few feet away.
After not too long, he emerged, probably signed a couple of autographs, maybe shook a hand or two. He was turning to get into his car, and I knew this was my last chance. So I tapped him on the back. Tapped him again. He turned around. “CanyoudoyourElvisimpersonation?” He stared at me. “Can you do your Elvis impersonation?” I asked again. I don’t recall his exact answer, but it boiled down to, “Oh hell no.”
He spoke to a couple of other people and I went back to my friends, reporting on the exchange. By this time, a light drizzle had started, and they just wanted to get back to the dorm. Another minute later, his car began to ease away. Safely embraced by the back seat, he still had his window down, pleasing the giggly-verging-on-insane girls in the crowd, until he got to the most insane one of all.
“Elvis is the best!” I shouted, having lost all connection to reality. “Except you!”
He made no attempt to hide his scorn, and these words I shall never forget. “Get outta the rain,” he spat. Then Billy Joel rolled up his window, and his car disappeared into the night.
Today — oddly enough, a Tuesday — I heard a song that I think I knew existed, but I’m not sure I’d ever heard: “I Don’t Like Mondays.”
I certainly couldn’t have sung it for you, or told you that the Boomtown Rats sang it. (PS I don’t know so much about the Boomtown Rats; does Bob Geldof always sound like a half-asleep Elvis Costello or is it special for this song?) Now I know these things.
I will also now have to work against my brain’s inclination to entangle this song with the phrase “Goodbye, Bue Monday,” which I want to credit to Kurt Vonnegut (and which the internet is not preventing me from crediting to Kurt Vonnegut, though I can’t quite believe that’s right).
Goodbye, Blue Monday is the alternate title for Breakfast of Champions, just one of the Vonnegut “classics” I decided I simply had to read round about my last years in high school/first years in college. I think their weirdness appealed to me at that time; nowadays, when I discover a book has Vonnegut-esque tendencies, I have to either unhappily fight my way through it or toss it altogether. Not much for the post-modern and self-reflexive/-loathing/-congratulatory, am I.
Also when I was in college (and still today) there was a coffeehouse in town called Goodbye, Blue Monday where all the cool kids hung out. It was mostly too smoky for me (I wonder if smoking is still allowed in there — probably not), but I did have half a date in there one time (with one of the cool kids).
ANYWAY. ADHD POST MUCH, TGOTS?
This is how a song I am fairly certain I’ve never heard before ended up reminding me of a coffee shop I once walked past, if not into, on a regular basis.
Do they know it’s nutjob time, Bob Geldof? Well tonight thank God it’s TGOTS instead of you.
(Oh, dear. ADHD and COMPLETELY inappro: equating bad blogging with starvation in Africa. It’s just that that’s my only Geldof point of reference!)
It’s been several months since we Touched the Rod, so here goes.
It struck me, as I sang lightly along with “Some Guys” this morning, that it was one of the earliest pop songs I remember practicing the words to. As a wee Kitt, I thought the chorus was catchy and clever, and I prided myself on — wait. Now I think it was “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics.
Wait! Both feature choruses that categorize “some” people by their qualities: in Rod’s case, the guys with luck, pain, breaks, and a tendency to complain; in the Eurythmics’ case, the them who want to use you, get used by you, abuse you, and be abused.
These songs came out in 1984 and 1983, respectively. Is it possible that, even at the age of 8 and 9, I was parsing and comparing lyrics? Oh, I sure hope so.
But that wasn’t even supposed to be the point of this post. The point was, I was idly humming along with The Rod this morning, and when it got to the “woo-0oh-ooh woo-ooh-ooh-ooh woo-ooh” part, I suddenly and quite subconsciously found myself imitating Madeline Kahn.
BECAUSE that self-same “woo-ooh” — same melody, same number of “oohs” – is part of the song “Ain’t Got No Home,” which she so fabulously sang on Saturday Night Live and probably elsewhere.
I cannot find video evidence of this performance. The closest I can find is a short, but no less fabulous, audio clip.
I also cannot find the innumerable online discussions that should be devoted to the fact that these songs contain the same “woo-ooh” bit. Is no one out there listening?
I know I have already written about Lady Gaga and “Bad Romance,” but it’s what I heard this morning, okay?
Also I am SO looking forward to THIS:
Oh, Glee. How you delight me. Though I’m not sure anything could top last week’s Joss Whedon/Neil Patrick Harris/Idina Menzel/Les Miserables/Aerosmith/Billy Joel/“Dream a Little Dream of Me” spectacular. I mean, it could really only have been better if Patty Griffin, Bruce Springsteen, and Sports Night had somehow been a part of it.
I drove onto campus today with Gaga blasting out of my windows, breaking the studentless summer stillness with her growling and groovy beats. We’re having one of those airless, humid summer mornings when it’s already too warm at 7 a.m. and promises to keep getting warmer. Gaga cut a little too harshly through that cloying quietude, so I turned her right down. It’s possible not everyone within a 500-foot radius of my vehicle felt like disco glam at that early hour.
The scene this morning contrasts sharply with one from last week, in which I hurtled down a near-deserted highway late at night, windows down and radio as loud as it would go. It was the end of a long day, and I was using the cool night air and the coolest tunes I could find to keep myself awake. When my scan hit the opening notes of “Born to Run,” I screamed with joy and sang, sang, sang. There on the lonesome streets of a runaway American dream, in the cool, empty night, I worried not in the slightest about the volume of my singing or my radio. If I woke a few cows or moose, I can live with that.
As I drove to work this morning, exhausted from a quick couple of days of travel (fun as they were), Rihanna sang that she would let me stand under her umbrella (-ella, -ella). Sun shining oh-so-beautifully on this gorgeous spring day, I thanked her kindly but declined the offer.
Actually, that song — like the whole Rihanna package itself — drives me batshit crazy. Hate the hook, hate the voice, hate the lazy lyrics. But the theme — I got your back, babe, forever and ever — did coincide nicely with what I was already thinking about this morning.
I regularly see two very different, and yet not so, couples as I drive to work. The first I’ve written of here before, I think: sixteen-year-old-ish boy and girl on their way to school, laughing and jostling each other and just seeming always to have a grand old time together, without any apparent teenage posturing or nonsense. I love the mornings when I see those two.
The other couple I often see is older, I’d guess in the neighborhood of 80. Almost every morning, as I approach a certain intersection in a residential neighborhood, I see a white sedan pull to the curb. The driver, a fella, pauses while his passenger, whom I presume to be his wife, gets out. He then drives two blocks and pulls into his driveway while his wife slowly follows him, making her way carefully down the sidewalk.
I’ve seen all this in bits and pieces, depending on the timing of my departure and the older couples, so I’ve deduced that the situation is this: She can’t walk super far, but wants to walk a bit, so he drives her to a starting point — pretty much every single day — and then waits while she makes her way home.
Keep your umbrella, Rihanna. I’ll take pure, frequent, comfortable, un-self-conscious laughter on long morning walks with someone who’ll promise, when we’re old, to drive me two blocks so I can walk as far as I’m able, and be home when I get there.
