escape (the pina colada song) is the last hit of the 1970s and the first hit of the 1980s. (if i had realized this at the dawn of that decade, i would have crawled into a cave and waited for the 1990s to come.) it didn’t start out as a monster hit; most people didn’t get it when it was simply called escape. but hell — they knew the pina colada part, so some smart record company stiff added (the pina colada song) and the song went like gangbusters.
i couldn’t drink (legally) at age 14 when this song came out. i didn’t like wussy songs that talked about getting caught in the rain or some froo-froo coconut concoction. i liked the cars; i liked blondie; i liked the police; i liked tom petty and the heartbreakers. in short, i liked things that either rocked or gave me new wave chills. this song did none of the above; it merely seemed like a monotonous radio death march, accessible for married people over 40.
now that i am a married person over 40, i come to this song with a new appreciation. well, maybe appreciation is not quite the word i’m after. annoyance, i suppose. i mean, think about it: if i was dissatisfied with my beloved spouse (AKA BS) and i put a classified out there in the world looking for Mr-Right-Take-Two (in the manner that the singer, a passive-aggressive bastard who can’t actually talk to his girlfriend about their relationship, did); and if i went to that smoky bar and found out that the ad had been answered by BS, would i be laughing with BS about the fact that we have so very much in common? would i be thrilled that the classified had brought us together?
hell, no. i’d be calling up a lawyer.
gee whiz, if i were writing a classified ad to this song, i think it would go something like this:
happy birthday, BS. this one’s for you, you all-american guy.
C. W. McCall (Bill Fries) made truckers cool (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and started a huge citizens band (CB) radio craze in the mid-1970s, all because of his novelty hit convoy. yes, children, the 70s were full of novelty hits, some dumb, some dumber, and some incredibly moronic. my favorites were the type made by the late, great dickie goodman, like mr. jaws, where goodman would interlace a story with snippets of popular songs. i would spend my days writing my own versions of mr. jaws — i turned one in to my music teacher as an assignment. i’m sure i got a pat on the head and a note in my permanent record.
but convoy is a classic piece of white trash. i blame it for things like the popularity of the dukes of hazzard, for one thing. yay! let’s sing about burly men who probably think cracker barrel is the height of american cuisine! i admit, the lyrics are sheer poetry. how to pick favorite parts of the song? like trying to pick out which cousin i would rather marry which child is my favorite.
but i’m game.
There ‘as armored cars, and tanks, and Jeeps
An’ rigs of every size
Yeah them chicken coops ‘as full a bears
An’ choppers filled the skies
Well we shot the line, an’ we went for broke
With a thousand screamin’ trucks
And eleven long-haired friends of Jesus
In a chartreuse microbus
chartreuse? wow. that’s a .50 word right there, mr. trucker.
the song was absolutely HUGE in christmas of 1975 when my family drove on down to florida for our semi-annual holiday visit to the grandparents. and kids, since this was years before we had tape players in our cars (dad didn’t get a tape player in a car until the 1980s showed up), we were at the very mercy of local radio stations. (and all this in an era when I-95 was not exactly completed.) oh yes, there were moments when we could get musicradio WABC, all the way from NYC, in the middle of the night in the middle of the carolinas; but mostly, we were at the mercy of deep south local radio. which, at that time, seemed to be heavy on country and revivals and local chatter.
we would pray to get some top 40 station (this was before we ended up listening, nonstop, to FM and the glories of album-oriented rock.) and no matter where we were in our travels, we would hear CONVOY screaming from the little tinny radio. at one point, when we were driving over some florida bridge, someone thought they saw a condor, and then, the song became CONDOR to my family. to this day, i am not entirely sure whether it’s about a truck or a bird.
a few summers later, a friend’s family took me on vacation. we drove from NJ to NC. her dad had a CB radio in the car, and there we were, two nice jewish young teens, attempting to talk CB to truckers all over the south. i’m not exactly certain, but i think there were a few truckers out there that were pretty annoyed by our pathetic attempts to talk on the air. in short, nice jewish girls should not be on CB radios talking to truckers.
later on, i believe there was a convoy christmas song released. nothing says christmas like a song about truck drivers because everyone knows deep-down that santa is a redneck. just look at the suit!
(oh santa baby, if you’re out there: just kidding.)
silver convention, originally a male german duo, hit the charts when they added three women who assumed all the singing and shiny costume-wearing duties. i suspect they were not very good english speakers: fly robin fly consists of exactly six words. hearing it as a child made me think of steve allen and the time he punctured vacant pop lyrics on his show. boy, what would he do with THIS one!
musically, the song is a never-ending loop of violins punctuated by heavily-accented women urging robin to fly up, up to the sky. (was it a bird? a plane? a gibb brother?) it could still be playing somewhere, nearly 25 years later, winning a Guinness Book of World records for most never-ending, incredibly banal song. so how on EARTH could this aural wonder be topped?
oh, ye of little faith.
get up and boogie is a musical twin to fly robin fly. it, too, is a loop of violins that could permanently worm its way into your ears for a lifetime, it, too, consists of six words. four of them are sung by the shiny german ladies. but two of those words, two of them, shouted at the end of each musical thought, interrupt that groovy disco lull, upping the nuisance factor: that’s right!
i was not a disco fan when this came out in the mid-1970s. in fact, i was a snarky tween girl; and i probably was rapping before it was cool. whenever i heard this song, i would start my patter, just after the ladies stopped singing get up and boogie for the second time, and then, over the little musical bed, i’d begin to talk. i’d say things like:
my brother is such an incredible jerk. we should have kept the cat and given him away. he must be the most annoying person in the whole wide world.
and i’d stop, just in time for the guys to scream: that’s right!
(yeah, i was a card. i know.)
sadly, i don’t recall any other hits from this bunch. it’s time for their comeback: succinct memoirs are definitely in vogue. here’s theirs:
i made some brief notes to myself about the event. i suspect i will write in more length about it, but for now, here are some abbreviated, up-to-the-minute thoughts from a person who probably was under the influence of too much sugar, both literally and figuratively speaking.
1) i used to like people. then i came to disney. yes, mr. ripley. i am not by nature misanthropic. not until i hit the magic kingdom; then, all bets are off. people — grownups and kids alike — are on their worst behavior. i cut kids slack here — they’re kids, after all — but the grownups?
we were waiting on line for the animal safari in animal kingdom — a neat place and a neat ride, incidentally. i like to use lines as a teachable lesson for my kids. you know, an exercise in patience and fairness? a woman and her two kids continually tried to push ahead of us, the family ahead of us, and the older couple on the motorized scooter in front of them. eventually, they succeeded, hitting their trifecta of triumph. what we didn’t know: the woman’s friend and the friend’s young son did not push ahead and remained behind us. why are you so far behind? miss pushypushy asked her friend. why don’t you come up here and join us?
in one of the rarest moments ever, BS and i said in unison, NO! we had had it. for 20 minutes, this woman kept on pushing, nearly trampling over people. i added, if you’d like to join your friends, you can move back and join them.
i noticed that the friend behind us suddenly had a few words with BS. i didn’t hear them at first, so i asked BS what the woman left behind had said.
he replied: she told me “have a nice day! hope you get sent to iraq!”
yes. it’s a small world, after all.
2) don’t walk? don’t come. no, i don’t mean people who really need wheelchairs. but i continue to be shocked by the number of strollers housing children who are old enough to accomplish long division. conversely, if you aren’t old enough to walk, you probably are too young to remember the experience. i suspect if you’re child #3 and you’re being dragged along for the ride thanks to sibling #1 and sibling #2, i can cut some slack. but seriously? we went to the halloween party, where we walked in with two parents, two grandparents, and a baby girl who was maybe a wee bit over one. let’s see: an evening that costs $50 per person. you’re bringing a baby in at 7 pm. it’s going to be dark in five minutes. yep. a worthwhile expenditure.
BC started pumping my hand every time we passed a child in a stroller who was older than 4. (it’s almost a dead giveaway when you see them reading.) (yes, my daughter is becoming as snarky as her mom.) i tried to take the high road on this, but it’s awfully difficult when you see kids who are too damn lazy to move. which we saw. incessantly.
at one point, i ended up talking to a disney employee, who noted in amazement about the number of people who arrive, pick up wheelchairs (especially those zippy motorized ones), and zip around from ride to ride. they just don’t want to walk around the park. you know, she said with great candor, i understand if someone has a disability, a bad knee, that sort of thing. but these people just come here and pretend to have an issue when they’re just plain lazy.
whoa. i thought the employees were shiny and happy all the time.
3) freaky people. then, there are the scary people who live for disney. you know the ones, the folks with personalized disney plates? the ones who visit the place every month? they’ve gotten married here, they’ve given birth on the monorail, and they plan to have mickey mouse circumcise their baby boy? while waiting for dinner one night, we saw a couple there who made me hold tight to my children. (it didn’t help that the guy looked like charlie manson.) i suspect they each wore about 50 pounds of disney pins.
yes, i’m here to tell you that i am clearly deficient as a mother. we did not dress up in homemade, matching disney costumes like so many families did at the halloween party. i am not crafty enough to make one costume (unless you count taking a bedsheet, poking two holes in it, and calling it a “ghost suit.”) frankly, i was lucky that i remembered to pack the kids’ costumes.
speaking of matchy-matchy fun, when we were poor, starving newlyweds, BS and i bought matching polo shirts at montgomery wards to wear to the bahamas, an ill-fated trip which i spent in the bathroom, barfing my guts out for a full 24-hours before skeedaddling back to the US for medical treatment. thus, i am also not one of those chicks who makes my husband and kids wear the same shirt as i while we travel to walt’s world. too much bad karma.
besides: BS would look dorky if i made him wear a tinkerbell shirt.
anyway, there’s so much more to share, including the folks who brought their Ipods to watch shows while waiting on line rides. see, every. minute. must. be. filled. silly us, we talked to each other while we waited. (well, that, and we watched this young girl toss her cookies massively while we were on the Toy Story Mania ride line. most people were grossed out. several found a way to step around the sea of woof. they had waited a long time, and dammit, they were not going to be hindered by that!)
in fact, i thought of this song after thinking about last week’s guilty pleasure monday selection. wow, i thought, didn’t simply red sing “something about you”? no, they didn’t — level 42, another uk band with a mellow sound (clearly destined for soft rock stations everywhere), are the guilty party.
now, the kids of today (yes, please lecture us, granny wreke!) cannot remember the time when people actually looked forward to watching music videos! (YES! and there was a time when we had no such thing as “the real world,” “TRL,” and rap actually was decent and said something interesting.) but, yeah verily, we folks of a certain age can remember actually watching music videos.
and something about you has a video that completely freaked me out. the video, seen above, appears to show something scary about each band member’s relationship with their (real? who knows) girlfriends/wives. that’s not so bad, i suppose. i mean, every relationship has a downside. but then…
ENTER THE CLOWN.
that freaky clown scared the crap out of me.
to this day, i wonder: when BS and i are arguing, is the clown behind me, glowering? when we drive away in the car, is the clown peering through my doorway? is he performing a song and dance in my attic?
so i knew i must nominate this song for guilty pleasure monday.
yesterday, i had the pleasure of sitting beside two mothers, both with babies. one was armed with weisbluth’s healthy sleep habits, happy child. the two began to talk about sleep training. i began to smile, thinking about the joys of sleep training (or lack thereof) my kids.
in order to fully prepare yourself for sleep training, you ought to first start by watching a 72-hour marathon of something truly awful, never once allowing yourself to rest. (i recommend something like saved by the bell. or caillou. or, perhaps, jerry springer?) intermittently, you need to start a painful discussion with your partner every six hours or so, just so that you can get yourself swirled into an emotional fever pitch. fight about money? your in-laws? your politics? his wandering eye? whatever gets you truly exhausted and exasperated — that’s your topic. also, whack yourself in the head a few times. sporadically, of course, and not enough to cause brain damage. maybe you shouldn’t eat much, either, during this time.
once you’ve completed torture time, get ready to rumble.
seriously, i thought i was going to lose my mind when BC was a baby. nevermind that she had reflux, was colicky, did not gain weight well, and was often sick. she never. ever. slept. my mother would try to make me feel better: she’s always awake because she’s so smart — she’s curious about the world. [note to self: must remember this line when BC’s first child never sleeps.] but all the books i read said that a child naps a certain number of hours, a child goes to bed for certain hours.
BC never did either.
i would start the nightly walk with BC once the colic started. i sang the entire Beatles repertoire, i sang plenty of the crosby, stills, nash catalog, and of course, i sang her nightly bedtime song:
the girl loved my singing, but she’d never settle down to sleep. i’d rock her, she’d nap, i’d put her down, she’d wake up screaming. i had to feed her every time she wanted food — she was a poor weight gainer, so i was shoving a bottle at her every time i could, all hours, all the time. it was a dance that led her to poor sleep habits for awhile and led me to a horrific case of shingles.
girlfriend didn’t have a full night of sleep until she was 18 months old.
when jools started down that path, there was no way on Dog’s Green Earth we were reliving that fun. see, i am from the rock the child to sleep attachment parenting front but my husband is from the shut the door and let him scream until next tuesday front. (not to be confused with those women from venus and men from mars fronts.) in short, we could not agree.
there was a time when i’d laugh at the idea of paying for someone to help you learn parenting skills. i laugh no more. the woman who saved our sleep, our marriage, our sanity, cost us very little compared to what she gave us: she got BS and me on the same page about sleep training (read: gentle ferberization), and she got jools sleeping perfectly in no time. she gave us a plan; we followed it. and. it. worked.
i have friends who are serious attachment parenting people; and if that works for them, i am happy. live and let live. i think different kids have different temperaments, and so what works for one child may not work for them all. for me? well, i was always afraid i would roll over on a baby if i co-slept. i was that tired. and the funny thing that i notice about some of my friends who let the kids sleep in their rooms — they have a hell of a time getting their kids out of their bedrooms and into their own rooms later on.
so now, our sleep is interrupted more by other things: sick kids, kids who fear the impending death of their mother, angst. but we turn on our nighttime music, cuddle up with whatever (or whoever) is near, and attempt to re-enter that magical realm of morpheus.
so, as i listened to the mothers — one, a mother of a three-month old, and the other, a mother of a toddler and a newborn — talk about sleep theories, i chuckled to myself.
we have a sad little trend happening here in the wreke house: kids terrified that their mom (read: moi) is going to die.
my kids have been through an emotional mill. they remember a time when i went to the emergency room and didn’t emerge for a few days. they visited and saw a mom who was covered, head to toe, in purple blotches, with needles in her arms. (the perfect visual: my BFF jaxx came in, took one look at me, and announced: you look like a crack whore.) then, a day after i was released, i was back in the hospital for over a week. my recovery from ITP took months (and i’m still in remission — yay, me!), and during that time, i learned how each handles this stress.
while i was in the hospital, BC (ever her mother’s daughter) apparently cried every single day at school. her first grade teachers and the guidance counselor were absolutely amazing — they took her under their wings, they gave her TLC, and they let her know that they were in her corner. once i came home, she settled down a bit.
jools, on the other hand, a sturdy almost-three-year old at the time, was fine at school. once i returned from the hospital, though, he wanted to be with me at all times. at night, he didn’t want to go to bed for fear i would not be there in the morning.
the hardest thing about being a parent with a serious illness may very well be coping with, and for, your children. that peaceful, calm moment of childhood is ripped away from your children suddenly; and in it’s stead lies a terrifying potential reality of extreme loss. it never really leaves, either: my mother’s first bout with breast cancer happened when i was 15. she’s always very up-front with me about things, and yet, i still get nervous every time she goes to a doctor. and i’m a grown-up.
it stands to reason, then, that every time something seriously medical is on the horizon, my kids prepare for the worst. and, in short, i have to get my gallbladder out. and suddenly, everyone is afraid. BC isn’t sleeping; her upset makes her coughing so much worse. jools is randomly noting things, such as: “when you die, i want to give you my star (that he made in his kindergarten class earlier in the week.)” it is enough to make me wonder whether they know something i do not.
but, to paraphrase mark twain, the rumors of my impending death are greatly exaggerated.
sure, any operation is a little riskier for us CVID folks, as any infection is not something we need. but this is my gallbladder. it’s not brain surgery. it will go well; i’m not too terribly concerned. but it doesn’t matter how many times i tell my kids that so many of their loved ones have had this very same operation. girlfriend and mr. man are on the alert.
i have to get past my own angst here and do whatever i can to make them feel more comfortable. short of constantly reassuring them, though, i don’t know what else to do.
it crushes me to know that i am the reason they’re so distressed.
it’s after midnight. and for over a week now, girlfriend awakes in this time, starts barking and coughing her head off, and generally gets hysterical. with her coughing history, we are never sure whether it’s allergies, reflux, an actual infection, a virus, or none of the above. a good friend’s twins also has this and was told it’s viral, which of course means we just have to suck it up and deal.
but it’s hard to suck it up and deal when no one is getting any sleep around here.
girlfriend already missed two days of school last week because she felt so incredibly awful. of course, this week is the week that her class is in mandated swim lessons. today, she told me she could barely make it through the laps she was required to swim; it was difficult to breathe. between the nasonex, albuterol, allegra (interspersed at times with benedryl, which gave her scary dreams last night when she was sleeping), and the z-pack, i just don’t know what the hell to do.
girlfriend gets hysterical because she knows she’s waking everyone up. getting hysterical, as we all know, doesn’t help. no one is mad at her because she’s coughing. we people of the adult variety may seem a little stiff and gruff at this hour only because we, too, are feeling the effects of negligible sleep; but no one is mad at the girl. we want to help her. we just feel completely helpless at the moment.
my magic wand is broken at the moment, so i can’t seem to wave it and make things all better. it just so figures it would fail me at this moment.
plenty has been written about what happened on 9/11. people especially focus on what happened in NYC, as the sheer number of lives and the immense destruction of the twin towers is just overwhelming. but on this anniversary of one of the worst days we have ever known, i thought i’d share a glimpse of what life was like for a mom and her small child directly in the flight path toward the pentagon and DC. it’s something i perpetually need to exorcise.
tuesday morning, 9/11/01, started like any other tuesday. most tuesdays, BC, then almost 3, stayed home from her preschool in BS’s office building. i had negotiated that in my last job — tuesdays were my mommy and me days, and i ended up leaving that last job when my then-boss, a seriously unhappy person who had inherited me from my previous angel-of-a-boss, just didn’t like that i didn’t sit at my desk 80 hours/week.
anyway, like all tuesdays, we were off to our co-op at a local community center. BS had a meeting way up in Maryland that day, so he wasn’t going to be able to take BC in to school, anyway, so it was just as well she was home with me. i did what i always did at about 8:50 am — i plopped her on the couch, turned on the Today Show, and started to put on her shoes and socks. only that day, i was instantly transfixed by one of the Twin Towers on fire. my aunt told me once that she occasionally helped a friend in the office downtown. i wondered immediately if she was there. i couldn’t move, though. just couldn’t. then, as i finally started to dial the phone, i saw, live on TV, a second plane. my heart immediately flipped into my throat: where’s my aunt?
i looked down at BC, who was messing about with something on the couch. oh my G-d, she musn’t see this, i thought. quickly, i clicked the TV off and ran back to the phone to call my aunt. no one was answering the phone. okay, okay, okay. don’t panic. don’t panic. i decided normalcy should be the order of the day. i quickly put BC’s shoes on, packed her into the car, and went off to the community center.
once we arrived, i saw moms huddled around a small television set. BC was the oldest in the co-op group (and has always been spookily emotionally astute), so i prayed she would get busy in the dress-up corner. but just as we seemed to be finally calming ourselves down, we heard the worst: a plane had hit the pentagon. as in, the building just down the road apiece.
and to add ridiculous insult to injury, the rumors began to fly that there was another plane in the air; that a plane had hit rosslyn, the state department, the Capitol; that the water was going to be contaminated. and there we were, right in the middle of the national airport and dulles airport flight paths. everyone began to sob. mama, BC asked, why are all the mommies sad?
sucking in all the air i could, i replied: they’re just feeling very sad today, sweetheart. how on earth do you tell a 2.5 year old girl that the world is imploding all around and nothing feels safe? you can’t. you’re a parent: your job is to maintain their world of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, happy cartoons, and teddy bears. you keep a straight face, a stiff upper lip, locked knees, and a stout heart. accepting my answer, she toddled back to the other little kids, who were pretty much oblivious in that way that only toddlers can be.
this left me free to quietly freak out. i tried to call BS’s cell phone. first, he didn’t answer. then, the lines were all beeping dementedly. decision time, and its all down to me.
i decided to take my baby girl home.
once we arrived home, i declared it an ALL BARNEY DAY! little girl could not. believe. her. luck. i stacked the videos of the VJE (Vile Jurassic Entity) in our family room and prepared to play them, one by one. and then, if we ran out, i’d play them all again. she was only under three — at that age, they love to watch things repeatedly.
i then moved out to the sun room. i set the TV up to the news and began to field the calls, first from my mother (my aunt — her sister — was later found at her significant other’s apartment, safe and sound. but at that point, neither of us could find her, and we scared each other), then from my mother in law, then from a local friend who told me that i needed to fill up my bathtub in case they attacked the water company. (i dutifully filled up the bathtub, then locked the door so that little BC didn’t toddle in and drown.) no, i had no idea where my husband was. no, i didn’t know whether the planes were continuing to fall here, but i had heard they might. as we live in the flight path, i listened for any sounds of planes overhead; all i heard was an eerie silence.
i continued to watch the TV. i watched as my town’s firefighters, police, etc, swarmed at the pentagon, the first on the scene as it happened. i hoped that my husband would come home, and soon. (he didn’t come home for hours: he had volunteered to drive three other people home, a drive on panic-riddled roads literally to the other side of maryland, then back again to virginia.) i prayed the carnage would end.
i was grateful that BC was home with me that day. on any other day, she would have been downtown. she would have been stranded, as BS was not at the office, left with the other children, children who had no food delivered to their daycare/preschool because the federal building was shutting things down due to the emergency. (the parents in the building banded together, bought all the pizza they could from the cafeteria, and brought it to the children.) with traffic snarled all around the city, i do not actually know how i would have gotten to her. i made a mental note to call my girlfriend, who worked with BS: should this ever happen again, please, please… take my child wherever you go.
and i sat, all alone, panic-striken, frozen, terrified i would jump out of my skin. but then, i’d see this little girl, her little blondey-boop-a-doop pony tail bopping around to there are seven days in the week. i had to keep her wrapped in cotton wool. there would be time later to talk about the truth (in her case, when she was eight), but for now, i had to be the strongest, most dependable mom on planet earth.
i tried my best; i really, really did. and i don’t think i have ever been so close to a nervous breakdown in my entire life. it took hours for BS to come home, and he told me how he had driven past the pentagon mere moments before the plane hit. later, i would learn that the wife of a colleague of mine was on that plane. later, i would volunteer my yard to house one of the 184 trees in my county planted to memorialize the Pentagon victims. later, i would drive by the burnt-out Pentagon and catch my breath; later still, i would drive by the Pentagon and have to catch my breath again when i saw the incredible rebuilding progress.
it would take me years before i stopped looking up at the sky, wondering whether the plane would stay suspended in the air or whether it would fall on my home, ending everthing in an instant. it would take me years before i would feel comfortable sending my children back to school in a federal building, especially one so close to the Capitol. it would take me years before i would get used to seeing SWAT teams occasionally atop places like the Dept of Justice or FBI (mercifully, no longer) or occasional armed army guys in the Metro. it would take me years to get used to concrete barricades around my children’s playgrounds; it would take longer still for me to grasp the contingency plans we’d have to make in case something threatened the FBI building catty-corner to the playground –things like shrapnel, pieces of building falling into the place where kids on slides might be. it would take me years before i felt okay living so close to the Nation’s Capitol.
it would take me years before i would feel safe and sound.
