My Mother Dancing.

A green cover that had the look of a well-played record, the ring of the round discs on the outside of it looked like the small scars of age,  the two enclosed vinyl records sounded as if they had been stored in a coal mine, the songs crackly, skippy and almost faded from too many plays, a sound version of Black Lung disease. The songs sounded different from what was usually on our turntable; Jim Croce, Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder, and various K-Tel compilation records that were so stuffed with current hits one could say these quick sell records were the forebears to streaming. Twenty-plus songs usually packed each side, it was easy to drop the needle to a favorite like Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From” or “Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss and K-Tel was the only way I could sneak one of a Kiss song into the house as an eager third grader. The record we were playing was a record bought over the television, from one of the companies that would flood after school television hawking collections of minor artists like Slim Whitman, Engelbart Humperdinck and Boxcar Willie who were mostly doing spot on covers of older named songs by more popular artists like Hank Williams Sr., Elvis, and Frank Sinatra. These companies churned out these collections at a quick pace, usually with the songs playing in the background while the track listing scrolled up the screen like movie credits, the artist usually singing on a darked stage with red or blue lights surrounding them. One could usually buy a two record set for 6.99 or 7.99 including postage on a double record or twin 8-track tapes, the song list would go on and on as the announcer pulled on the nostalgic heart-strings of folks who were pining for the ”good old” days that, at the time were only fifteen or twenty years in the past. For my siblings and I the music on this green covered double LP collection sounded from a long-lost time, a soundscape time-capsule of a period where the world was black & white, where clothes looked different, the world filled with short hair, the only men with beards were cowboys or villains from the movies and all the women and girls wore dresses. We had borrowed the record from a friend in the neighborhood. My mother bounded down the stairs, jumped off the last few stairs and immediately began to sway her hips from one direction to the other, with two rocks to the right, then two rocks to the left as she inched her way forward. Her lips pursed, a crackle in her eye she started mouthing all the words to “The Book of Love” we, her children sat both horrified and perplexed by our mother knowing the words to this old song that was a foreign to us as a horse and buggy. 

Her eyes raised again, as she twirled around to the sounds of the inherently great “Sh-Boom” by The Chords, we were floored as she even knew the gobbly-gook of the second bridge scat that sounds something like  “heylongleedingdongdelangdelanghohodippohdopeydopeydip” that then flows into the chorus, our brains nearly exploded when she sang the deep baritone solo of “every time I look at you…” This person who was dancing in odd steps, a few steps forward, a few steps backwards but always, somehow moving forward, with twirls and dressed in faded jeans, a yellowed tank top sans bra and large hooped earrings knew this Fred Flintstone caveman-like music. We started the record over while my mother encouraged us, and gasped as she put her lips together and made the burbling-spittle sounds of the revving motorcycle in “Leader of the Pack” and then we completely lost our shit, laying on the ground giggling at the ceiling as she in a womanly-deep voice, in hindsight sounding a bit like Bea Arthur the lyrics to “Chantilly Lace” and held a make-believe telephone to her ear. 

            “Wake Up Little Susie” by the Everly Brothers floated out of the stereo speakers, lifted and carried my mother back to 1957 when she would have been 14 years old, shuffling around the room she took the hands of my step-father David, a shy man who was reticent to show his emotions but beneath his thick beard he took her hand and twirled her, brought her close where she pinged backwards still holding his hands and he twirled her again. She was laughing like the schoolgirl that she was transformed in, I watched every move as they laughed, storing away their dance moves deep in my mind to pull them out in four more years as I attended my first 7^th grade dance and surprised all of my classmates by knowing how to dance, albeit in a 1950’s style but none of us knew better. We pulled out the other record from the sleeve, put it on the turntable and the sounds of Dion & the Belmonts covered the living room. Released during my mother’s senior year of high school, the song is pretty self-explanatory, “here’s my story, it’s sad but true, it’s about a girl I once knew who took my love and then ran around with every single guy in town.” She knew all the hey-heys and wam-bi0le-le, hey-hey as she slung her shoulders down, rocking back and forth, snapping her fingers and twirling her long red hair. I thought she was the most beautiful and carefree woman in the world at that point, to see her joyous was a very precious moment, even at the age of eight I knew this was special. “My friends used to sing this song and ‘wake up little Susie’ to me all the time” she gushed to us, pulling the curtains of her past ever so slightly. She never talked about high school just that she pushed her parents to the limits.  Later, she would go more in depth about her high school experience, how her school Lincoln McKinnley was one of the very first integrated schools in Columbus, that she had black boyfriends with the approval of her mother and that she was known as the most dramatic girl in high school. Later, the lyrics to those songs would tell me a bit more about my mother. 

Tags: Bela Koe-Krompecher, childhood, Grief, Jenny Mae, Jerry Wick, memories