When I was almost 15, this was the plan: I would learn to play guitar and be the next Carly Simon. I was dead serious this time. This wasn’t going to be like dozens of other attempts to remake my adolescent self. I’d had a few-shall we say-misfires on the hard road to transformation, and I’d learned a thing or two along the way.
Take, for example, Memorable Lesson No. 42: Letting your best friend in the whole 7th grade perm your hair into an Aretha Franklin Afro not only does not make you look like the “Queen of Soul” (especially if you have blue eyes and are built like a Bic Banana) but also is likely to torpedo your mom straight into hyperventilation.
This time around, I wasn’t into shocking Mom (not as a main goal, anyway). I was lookin’ to be worshipped. I figured I’d strum a few chords, wail a lot of “my-man-he-done-me-wrong” love songs and pretty soon I’d have all kinds of groupies around me, pleading, “Oh, pleeeeease, just one more song,” and boys asking me to autograph their bulging biceps. Older boys-ages 16, maybe even 17.
This scheme made perfect sense to me, especially the Carly Simon part. We both had long brown hair, big teeth and the same initials. And get this: We were even the same astrological sign. (Yeah, I know-like a message from God, isn’t it?). That Carly Simon was more than a decade older, a foot taller and musically gifted were differences I dismissed as subtle and not worth stewing over.
There was only one snag in my plan. I had to convince my hard-working, penny-scraping parents that they should blow the equivalent of two weeks’ worth of groceries on a guitar for their eldest daughter. Which, I might add, I didn’t think should be such a big deal since I was the only one of their four kids who appreciated them anyway. (That argument wasn’t the one that worked, by the way.)
I didn’t waste much of my lobbying on Mom, whose attitude toward singers was pretty basic: There were two types of music-Engelbert Humperdinck and noise. And comparing myself to Carly Simon was a real stroke of stupidity because my mother had seen her album covers. Her immediate reaction was to clutch her heaving chest and say in a low, threatening voice, “Do you mean to tell me you think you’re going to leave this house wearing little T-shirts with no bra?”
Clearly, Mom was missing the point. Well, OK, so maybe she wasn’t, but geez.
Fortunately, there was Dad. Like me, Dad loved to sing. Unlike me, he thought he sounded like Dean Martin. Being totally without scruples or shame, I told him I thought he did too. Worked like a charm, if you don’t count how much squirming I had to do to ignore my mother, who stood behind him with her eyes narrowed to slits as she silently mouthed, “Shame on you.”
“And you know, Dad, you kinda look like him too,” I added, which made my red-haired, freckle-faced father beam as my mother pretended to faint.
That clinched it. “You know, Jane,” my father said to my mother as he stood with his hands on his hips and eyed me carefully. “We shouldn’t be surprised she’s got all that musical talent. I AM her father, after all.”
Three weeks later, on my 15th birthday, there it was-my own six-string, black-and-tan Chris Adjustomatic guitar nestled in a black case with bright red lining.
For the first couple of weeks, I practiced a lot. I practiced in front of my dresser mirror, looking cool with my guitar slung over my shoulder. I practiced swinging my hips and tossing my hair back as I mouthed the words to “You’re So Vain.” And I practiced bowing to my fans with my guitar thrust to my side.
Then my parents ruined it all by signing me up for guitar lessons.
I grew up in a town roughly the size of a K mart. We had one guitar teacher-a polka bandleader who, week after agonizing week, struggled to mold me into the next star attraction at the annual kielbasa festival.
A year and a half of lessons always beginning with, “Anna one-a, anna two-a” can lead to some pretty scary nightmares. I kept having the same one over and over: I was at my high school’s 20th reunion. I was married to an accordion player, and I was wearing a leisure suit and pulling around my own bubble-blowing machine.
Clearly, it was time to have a heart-to-heart with good ol’ sympathetic Dad.
“I’m headed straight for a guest shot on Polka Variety,” I wailed to my father as he drove me home one evening after class.
To this day, I wish my mother had warned me that my Beatles-adoring, Dean Martin-idolizing father loved to dance the polka. Short of that, I wish she’d told me never to repeatedly pound the dashboard and howl with laughter when he admitted it. In HIS car. Miles away from home.
On the long walk home, I came to several realizations: First, a guitar case is a very heavy thing to have banging against your legs on a long walk home. Second, Carly Simon obviously hadn’t learned to play guitar froma polka player. And finally, I was born on the cusp, astrologically speaking, so it was OK not to be like her because we sort of weren’t really the same sign anyway.
Time has passed, but not much has changed. Carly Simon still is wearing those little T-shirts, Dad still thinks he sings like Dean Martin and I still have that guitar.
Every so often, my young daughter picks it up and strums along to her own songs, which always start with, “Ohhhhh, Mommy is so beauuuuuuutiful,” and end with, “And I don’t wanna go to bedddddd.”
Just as often, she hands the guitar to me and pleads for me to play her a song. I can’t, of course, which recently led me to confess to a friend that I still wish I’d learned how to play the guitar. A couple of weeks later she said she wished I had, too, and presented me with a book designed to teach me.
I’m going to give it a go. I owe it to two girls I know. One is 5 and calls me Mommy. The other is a 15-year-old I once knew who has suddenly shown up again, big dreams and all.
