| Subject: Re: Joni, Teresa and Inigo |
Author:
Boyd Percy
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Date Posted: 23:31:05 12/02/13 Mon
In reply to:
Wes
's message, "Joni, Teresa and Inigo" on 11:35:05 12/02/13 Mon
>Another column lifted from the paper:
>
>----------
>
>Time passes, whether we want it to or not. As I get
>older, sometimes I think that's the theme of my life.
>
>This morning Amanda and I were talking with a
>customer, and the subject ranged over several areas.
>At one point I made the comment, "People aren't going
>to know what they've got 'til it's gone."
>
>That line stuck with me for some reason -- and I knew
>the reason; it came from the song Big Yellow Taxi
>back when I was in my twenties. That part I was
>solid on, but I had it in mind that Joan Baez did it
>and I wasn't sure I was right.
>
>Google is your friend in such circumstances, and I
>only had to type a couple of words into the search
>engine before the answer popped up -- it wasn't Joan
>Baez, but Joni Mitchell. I figured that wasn't bad for
>not really being an old music freak and going on very
>old memories of a cherished time now longer in the
>past than I want to think about.
>
>But just for the heck of it I brought up a video of
>Joni doing the song back in the day when it was
>popular. She was a good-looking long-haired young
>blonde in a lavender gown, with a clear, youthful
>voice full of passion. Ah yes, those were the days . .
>. until I glanced down in the corner of the YouTube
>screen and noticed another video of Joni Mitchell
>singing at her seventieth birthday celebration earlier
>this year. She looks seventy, too.
>
>So what I want to know is how in the name of sin did
>Joni Mitchell get to be seventy?
>
>I won't go into the background since it's complicated,
>and since it's from a novel I'm working on, sort of
>irrelevant, but this weekend I needed the lyrics for
>Put Another Nickel In -- you know, "Put another
>nickel in, in the nickelodeon . . ." (For any kids
>reading, a nickelodeon was a jukebox, not a TV
>channel.) I mean, I knew the lyrics but thought I'd
>remembered them incorrectly and thanks to Google I
>found out I was right on that.
>
>But curiosity overwhelmed me when I discovered that it
>was Teresa Brewer's first big hit. Now, I do remember
>Teresa Brewer. She's more out of my parent's
>generation, but just for the heck of it I clicked on
>that YouTube link.
>
>It was a cute song, but primitive compared to modern
>standards -- wow! It sounded sort of like some of
>those old recordings out for the 1920s you can
>occasionally hear -- the technical standards were just
>not up to what we have become used to. In addition
>Teresa Brewer's kid voice just didn't measure up to
>her adult standards of later years . . . holy
>guacamole, Batman! That was 1950 and it was a
>long time ago!
>
>I told this story to Amanda, and of course she had one
>to match it. It seems she and her U of M student
>husband were at a party of his computer geek
>classmates over the weekend, and in talking about one
>thing and another she discovered that few of these had
>ever heard of The Princess Bride. "I am Inigo
>Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die . . ."
>Hey, that's after my time, too.
>
>"Here are all these geeks," she reported. "And they
>didn't even know the roots of their culture."
>
>There might even be a reason for that. Mandy Patinkin,
>who played Montoya, is close to my age . . . and she
>wonders how that happened, too.
>
>"It wasn't all that long ago," Amanda reports, "That
>when I was hanging around with a bunch of college kids
>I was the youngest one there. Now I'm the oldest. What
>happened?"
>
>Time passes whether you're having fun or not, Amanda.
>That's the way it works.
>
>This morning I was talking with a guy somewhere around
>my age out at the restaurant where I normally have
>breakfast. "You know," I told him. "I have come to the
>conclusion that in every senior citizen, there's an
>eighteen-year-old fighting to get out."
>
>The truth hurts at times.
No wonder the eighteen-year-old wants to get out, he sees what an interesting time your young characters, Cody, Janice, the Gravengood girls and Susan, are having and he wants to be a part of it.
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