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Benny's Loposser's friend
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Date Posted: 13:23:33 12/13/05 Tue
Lori, you've revived a memory:
oh, what mem'ries ... oh, the pain .....
Can you imagine the humiliation of being in the eighth grade and being named Alvin when David Seville loosed the chipmunks on an unsuspecting public? At first, I would simply survey the area upon hearing the first four unmistakeable notes of The Chipmunks' Christmas, or Christmas Christmastime is Here or whatever it's named, looking quickly around for an exit, a bleacher to dunk under, a drape to hide behind, anyplace to hide --
rarely did I find the escape I sought.
Dan has often said he wished he had a nickel for everytime someone asked him whether Same Old Lang Syne might be autobiographical. I'd love to have a nickel for any of these things I heard over and over, again and again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum:
1. "Alvin? Like the chipmunk?" [followed by laughter]
2. "Hey, chipmunk!" [followed by laughter]
3. "How's Simon?" [followed by laughter]
4. "How's Theodore?" [followed by laughter]
5. "Where are Simon and Theodore?" [followed by laughter]
6. "ALLLLLLLLLLL - VIN! [followed by laughter] and after which it was expected that I would shout back "O.K.!
=========================================================
- excuse me - I'm going to be ill -
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Over the next five or six years, I received probably two dozen 45 rpm's of this song. I found many uses for these records before I realized that I could re-gift for the purpose of making people uncomfortable. Before I was a senior, I learned the joy of giving back to the person who had given the record to me the year before. I would open an apparent record gift carefully so I could reuse the paper when I regifted. I was especially fond of marking through the original gift card in pencil and re-addressing it. Prior to learning about regifting, I learned the limits of a record's strength when subjected to various types of pressure. Hanging a 45 rpm on a tree and having a neighborhood competition using a baseball or rock was quite satifying. The most exhilirating experience involving one of these records occurred on the highest cliff in the Kingston area during kite-flying weather. My best friend Jim (later a trainer for the CIA)sailed the thing into a wind gust, and we cheered as the elements took it higher and higher and finally clear out of sight. Word of special events like this really gets around in a small town of a thousand people, and within a week, Benny Loposser (pronounced "low-PAH-sir") was at my door, handing me a brown paper sack.
"I heard about Jim throwing your record away. I found it. Here."
And he turned and walked away. Inside, I found a record he had given me two years earlier, wrapped in the taped-together original gift paper in which I had re-wrapped it to regift it back to him the following year.
At my twenty year reunion, they were still talking about the distance Jim and the wind got with that 45 rpm. And they were still talking about someone finding it and bringing it back. But, it wasn't just Benny "returning" my record. By then, the story had evolved into a dozen people showing up at my door, presenting the "record I'd lost".
It is my fervent prayer that, when Dan undertakes his second Christmas project, he does NOT record the Chipmunk Christmas song.
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