I was a little sister. There are five and seven years between me and my older brothers. I got into their shit all the time, too, because it turns out I was a little shit.
My mother, for a time a real estate agent, kept winning little portable TVs in the 1970s so each of us had a portable black and white TV in our rooms. I, the youngest, had the worst one, a square black box with a crazy wire-hanger antennae that only tuned into snow on every channel except one, PBS. It was like organic parental controls. So I only remember watching episodes of Lila’s Yoga on it. (And that show was oddly riveting.) Randy had a white portable and Andrew, the oldest, had a green portable which was the newest and best of the three.
After school in St. Louis, my brothers were always off playing sports and, as a latchkey kid, I had the house to myself. I’d fix a snack and head in to Andrew’s room to watch after-school TV. The big color TV in the den was too hard to operate. You needed pliers to turn the channels. Randy’s room was small and smelled like dirty socks. Andrew’s room not only had the best portable TV but a bookcase of books I often raided. I read all his Ralph Mouse books and he had some classics like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, He had the Louisa Mae Alcott books but those didn’t have any pictures inside and they looked old so I skipped those.
I also flipped through his somewhat large collection of Disney comic books. He would come home early some days, find me in there and then angrily kick me out. It must have been annoying as hell for him to come home and find his little sister in his private space. But I felt so bored in my own room until the day I finally inherited my grandmother’s old color TV and one of my brother’s old console stereos.
One summer after both Andrew and Randy were off at University of Illinois, I found a record stack they were sharing in Andrew’s room, records they had left behind that fall. And it’s a long story that involves anorexia, Prince-styled ruffled shirts, aerobics, mix tapes and a desperation to find songs with certain beats per minute, but I went through that stack of records one day. It was that desperation that overcome my normal aversion to their record stacks. We had a kind of rivalry or records, a gender contention between the testosterone, 70s and 80s rock albums of theirs and the 80s, queer-leaning pop records of mine. And although I had an appreciation for some of those 70s rock hits based on hearing them so many times down the hall, I was never looking to fine-tune that. It was a matter of principle.
But in any case, one day I did flip through and listened to some of them and I ended up pulling out three of Andrew’s records and “borrowing” them for a while.
For a long time I’ve tried to figure out what it was about those three records. I do this with Cher, too. I ask myself why I am a Cher fan? What was it that peaked my attention when I was four or five, combing through my parent’s record collection in Albuquerque and finding that first Sonny & Cher record? For Cher I have this whole “in utero” working-theory about being a baby inside a mother who had a deep smoker’s voice. I must find the contra altos comforting.
As I was assembling this blog story last week, I was also studying deep image poems in a book called Advanced Poetry by Kathryn Nuernberger and Maya Jewell Zeller. In the online notes for that chapter there was a link to an article by Federico García Lorca called “Theory and Play Of The Duende.” I read this same essay in grad school years ago and couldn’t make head nor tails of what this thing called duende was. And I remember that really irritated me at the time. It seemed like hocus-pocus literary blather. Lorca’s essay never comes to a finite definition of what duende was or even a helpful rubric.
But I read that essay again last week, on the other side of whole life of joy, suffering and heartburn, and I think I can understand it better now. it’s a non-academic idea is the whole thing, and not a little bit mysterious. But the voice on those records had this rare quality of duende. I now think that’s what it might be. Duende made me pull those records out.
I recently reconnected with this same brother because I was in Boston for a weekend in early August. It had been 18 years since I had connected with my brother and probably over 20 since I have stayed with him and his stack of records. Immediately, I started flipping through his records there in his living room. Without permission, just like I was a tween. I told him what concert I had seen the night before and he said he used to have Babys albums (the first three) but they disappeared. He said he believed his University of Illinois frat house buddies had most likely taken them because they were popular albums at frat parties. I just “yeah, that’s too bad about that,” literally shocked because I’ve had kept these records since I was 15. Yes, I’ve had them 40 years! And the thing is, I thought he knew it.
So when I got back home, I mailed those records back to him with an apology and the fifth Babys album as a modest interest payment. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t have a complete replacement set. My friend Christopher mailed me all the same records about seven years ago when he found them at a used record store.
Another thing I used to love to do in his bedroom was to read through his Mad Magazines magazines and books. I loved the Spy vs. Spy paperbacks. They were wordless and full of spy gadgets.
One day reading one of his Mad Magazines I came across a clip that featured Cher. It was, of course, a joke at her expense. But I was so thrilled to see a Cher mention in a Mad Magazine that I cut it out of his magazine and stuck it in my newly created Cher scrapbook.
Little sisters, am I right?
The clip was a joke about what an old Cher would look like at 50. They took a current 70s Cher photograph and played around with it, making her look gray and fat, which is interesting. Like she wouldn’t keep coloring over gray hair. Was that not a thing yet? And they never assumed she would straighten her teeth. And in the predictive copy, they have her back with Sonny, which just goes to show that even the hipsters at Mad Magazine wanted to see Sonny and Cher get back together in their imaginations.
For context, Cher turned 50 in 1996. The It’s a Man’s World album had just come out. After 50, Cher would go on to record a worldwide #1 hit, spend years on the road with a record-breaking concert tour and continue on as an international entertainment icon. Not that we should be upset with Mad Magazine. Who could have predicted the future accurately except Cher herself?
Here is the pilfered clipping next to what Cher did look like at age 50s. At the top is what Cher looks like today at 78, still better than this gag photo.
By the way, I still haven’t told my brother about this other Cher thievery yet so…everybody, let’s keep this one quiet, okay?
