Love and a 45
My parents loved music, though they were also both kind of square to mainstream in their tastes. My parents were teenagers in the '50s and were in their 20s in the '60s, but they didn't grab on to either the beatnik movement, or the hippie counterculture. By the time the swinging '70s came around, they had two kids and a massively June and Ward Cleaver family ethic. How they ended up with an indie-freak-child like me is a mystery I suspect they're still trying to figure out, though they've (mostly) finally grown to accept it and sometimes even admire it.
But anyway, squares or no, they DID love music, and they were GREAT dancers. My mother was a poodle-skirt wearing bobby-soxer in Philadelphia during the original Bandstand era. She played me Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, Eddie Fisher, and the Big Bopper and taught me to pony, twist, and jitterbug when I was just a teeny-tiny bit of a thing. My dad, who was a little older than my mom, was really into the big band stuff--Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Doris Day, Harry Bellafonte. He was the one who excitedly filled me in one day when I was in the family kitchen, singing what I thought was the They Might Be Giants song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" that the song was really originally performed by the group The Four Lads. And he was able to pull out the LP and play the orignal for me.
They both also loved Broadway musicals (and their movie counterparts) with a passion, and almost every night of my sister's and my early childhood, my parents would put an original Broadway cast recording album on the stereo while we ate dinner, and we'd all sing along throughout the meal. Just writing that sentence and remembering us doing that brings a smile to my face. It definitely ranks a 10 in my catalog of childhood memories. (And also, I can happily brag that by the time I was five or six, I was already the perfect gay male's theatre beard--I knew the songs to every big American musical ever made.)
My parents always took good care of their vinyl LP albums, but for some reason they ceded their 45s to me just as soon I was big enough to stick them on my totally cool Show 'N Tell record player (pictured above--mine looked EXACTLY like that). I remember their singles weren't in any sleeves--they were all just jammed into a fairly large metal 45-sized record case--aqua on the bottom with a cream-colored top. You'd flip open the metal clasp that held it shut, and the cream metal top would flip open and back, revealing the curved tops of hundreds of black vinyl 45 disks, packed one behind the other. For me as a child, opening this box was always like opening a treasure chest--you never knew what 45 you'd pull out next, what odd name was on the record, and what it would sound like when you put it on. It really ran the gamut, from cheesy novelty records to tacky Debby Reynolds ballads to classic Elvis.
Of course, over time, I developed my favorites, and those were always at the front of the box (or strewn on the floor--I was always a messy kid). And so now, I bring you one of those front-of-the-box singles. It's a song that's actually extremely rare and hard to find these days--it took me eons to find it on file-sharing sites before I was finally successful.
I re-discovered it earlier this week when I was sorting through old mp3s I'd downloaded ages ago. I clicked on this unlabeled mp3 and when I heard the song come up at me, I laughed and thought, "Well. This may explain a heck of a lot."
So, I now present to you a rare and hard-to-find musical gem, and one of my absolutely favorite songs to listen, sing, and dance along to when I was just a speck of a girl: