Many years after I had been forced to participate in music,
in school and in church, I developed a love for music. When I was in grade school—yes—back in
those days, we called it grade school, not elementary school. We had a “traveling” music teacher, who
would pop into the classroom from time to time, and take over the class. The regular teacher would leave and I
don’t know where she went went—but I am betting it was out of earshot! The
music teacher had a pitch pipe. She would hit a note, and then we all had to
hum that note, which produced something that sounded like a drunken beehive.
Then, she would break into a verse of “Some say the world is full of fun and
frolic,” all the while waving her arms like she was swatting at deer flies. She
had a set of choppers on her that made her wide-open mouth look like an
accordion. I always pictured her at a corn on the cob-eating contest—and I’m
betting she could do it through a picket fence. Our singing was always
accompanied by the slamming of other classroom doors throughout the school. Not
wanting to be guilty by association, I was one of the original lip sync
artists.
Then my mother made me sing in the church choir. The
pastor’s wife was the director, and when it came to directing music, she felt
that she was one cut above Leonard Bernstein. She had a vibrato in her voice
that sounded like you had put a vice grip on your tomcat’s tail, and then stuck
his wailing head in a paint shaker. No one could hear the choir, because she
had the microphone halfway down her throat. When we sang the “The Old Rugged
Cross,” people in the congregation would cry. It had nothing to do with
religious sentiment; it was just that painful to normal ears. She had a very
ample bosom that jiggled, and my dad said that was where the vibrato
originated. Dad always sat in the front pew, center aisle, grinning and
slapping his knee. He told me that some day when her bosoms started sagging,
her voice would fall with them, and she would sound more like Tennessee Ernie
than Liza Minnelli.
Then, I became a teenager, and along came Elvis and rock and
roll. When Elvis would start his thrusting and hip gyrations, my mother would
fan herself with her Bible and fluff her skirt, and swear that the world had
lost its moral bearings, and Satan himself had possessed the music industry.
But I loved rock and roll, and I loved that era and maybe, even though mom
thought I was perverted at the time, that music was what made my world go
around. I bought a small record player that played forty fives, and my dad
called it “the wave of the future” that would revolutionize the music industry
forever. By the time the Beatles came around, I was heading downhill again with
my love for music, and the only music I ever faced was when I came home from
the bar, after the softball games.
So now I am back to the oldies, and the good old songs that
would drift, on the soft summer breezes from my car radio, through the trees of
Lover’s Lane, north of Staples. I have forgotten what I did in Lover’s Lane
back then, but I will never forget those songs.
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