{"id":1941,"date":"2011-02-16T20:54:42","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T01:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1941"},"modified":"2015-09-25T20:29:42","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T00:29:42","slug":"kind-of-a-drag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1941","title":{"rendered":"Kind of a Drag"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

“Kate,” Part III<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kind Of A Drag, sung by the Buckinghams (1966), encountered 1966<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [To paraphrase Huckleberry Finn, you don’t know a thing about this story without you have read the two previous entries.\u00a0 Read them first<\/a>, and then come back.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

I learned upon getting back to high school in the fall, and finding Kate in my German class, that she was not tied up with the guy from the party now.\u00a0 (Maybe all my hallooing had done some good.)\u00a0 On a Saturday at the beginning of October, Kate let me take her to a University football game.\u00a0 She let me put my arm around her in the cold, and hold her hand, and she did not demur when I told her she was the only girl in the school worth troubling with.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No Making Out<\/h3>\n

But.\u00a0 But we talked about \u201cmaking out,\u201d which I commented to my journal had been the real thing I thought had come between us the previous year.\u00a0 I paraphrased her stance as \u201cShe doesn\u2019t like to do it except when the situation calls for it.\u201d\u00a0 Whatever that meant, it couldn\u2019t be good for anyone hoping to do that with her.\u00a0 Useful information to me, though.\u00a0 I could do respectful; I could do it well. And she faulted the late unlamented Jim for spending all his time doing that with her replacement.\u00a0 She blamed his proclivities that way for her dropping him. \u00a0So I thought maybe I could provide some kind of contrast.<\/p>\n

I was smitten in a way I had never experienced before.\u00a0 Too beautiful for words, I called her.\u00a0 I admired her strength in class.\u00a0 I admired her vulnerability discussing her parents\u2019 impending divorce, now shared with me.<\/p>\n

She certainly kept me off balance.\u00a0 We went to the theater a couple of times.\u00a0 But then there were other times when she would not come out with me, and I thought she didn\u2019t really want me.\u00a0 Then she would tell me, for instance, that she would blow off her Saturday night Quaker group to go out with me, whatever I wanted.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Swoon<\/h3>\n

And so we approach the crescendo.\u00a0 And here my journal fails me.\u00a0 It was both too confusing and too painful to write down coherently.\u00a0 But in brief, a competitor appeared at her Quaker teens\u2019 circle, and he<\/em> played in a brass rock band.\u00a0 I should have known I held no cards to match those.\u00a0 But still I kept on, and still she accepted some of my invitations for a while.\u00a0 So for a time I regarded myself as in a contest I could perhaps win (the Four Seasons\u2019 repeated refrain notwithstanding).<\/p>\n

This much the journal confirms: There came a moment when I kissed her and told her I loved her, and that was kind of the end.\u00a0 I have a picture in my mind \u2013 a picture of whose accuracy I am not sure \u2013 of the location and some of the circumstances.\u00a0 I think this happened near my house, when we were walking from there.\u00a0 I cannot construct a plausible explanation of why it would happen so far from her house or so near to mine.\u00a0 I seem to picture her face filling with dismay after my kiss and my avowal, and her refusing to let me hold her hand the rest of the way to wherever we were going.<\/p>\n

This I did not write down, but am absolutely clear on it: I lost several hours.\u00a0 This has only happened that one time to me.\u00a0 After that moment when I had put my heart on the line and knew I had lost, I went back to my room, and lay on the bed for several hours, my mind a complete blank.\u00a0 I mean I was not even conscious of being unconscious.\u00a0 The time just passed without my being in any sense aware of anything.\u00a0 Swoons were very popular in the 19th<\/sup> Century, I read.\u00a0 I think this may have qualified as a swoon.\u00a0 I came to with my mother calling me for dinner.\u00a0 My heart was officially broken.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A Drag<\/h3>\n

Yet even this was not the end, exactly.\u00a0 I drew the conclusion I should have been more bold \u2013 not recognizing the insuperable advantage that being in a rock group and part of Kate\u2019s Quaker circle gave Michael.\u00a0 I got invited by Kate to go to a coffeehouse and see Michael\u2019s group perform \u2013 and had to agree I found him likeable myself.\u00a0 (How much better it would have been if I could have hated him!)\u00a0 I went around miserable a lot of the time.<\/p>\n

And eventually, sort of \u2013 I got over her.\u00a0 And when, in December 1966, the Buckinghams\u2019 Kind of a Drag<\/em> started climbing the charts (\u201cKind of a drag\/When your baby don\u2019t love you\u201d \u2013 over upward cascading brass choruses \u2013 brass, damn it!<\/em>)[1] \u2013 that<\/em> became my theme music for a while.\u00a0 Well, until Sgt. Pepper<\/em> pushed it and everything else into oblivion right around the time of my graduation that June.\u00a0 (More about that in a later piece.)<\/p>\n

Nor, interestingly, was it quite the end of the story with Ella.\u00a0 Just after graduation, Ella came back into my life for a few dates.\u00a0 They were fun, if frustrating.\u00a0 She let me take her canoeing, and allowed me to me nibble on her ear as July 4th<\/sup> fireworks went off, though I saw her holding hands with another boy a couple of days later.<\/p>\n

Kate managed not to deal with sex with me, but she had to do it with someone, and in fact it was reportedly Mike from the brass band.\u00a0 She confided to me worriedly that summer that she was concerned that the liberties she was allowing him might result in her pregnancy. \u00a0At my school, that wasn\u2019t a far-fetched fear,[2] but Kate was spared that.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And Nowadays<\/h3>\n

You might think that at some point I would finally have washed my hands of the friendship underlying the yearnings.\u00a0 But that didn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 We have stayed in touch, off and on, over the years.<\/p>\n

The Buckinghams prophesy that \u201cGirl, I still love you,\/ I\u2019ll always love you,\/ Anyway.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s the way it feels at the time, but of course we all move on, especially from yearnings that afflict us in younger years.<\/p>\n

When I see Kate now, I am glad to see her.\u00a0 It is a very pleasant time, but I do not hope for sparks to fly, and they do not.\u00a0 Effectively, our relationship now is a descendant of our friendship, not of what I tried to make of it.\u00a0 My on-again, off-again romancing for a couple of years almost half a century back\u00a0is not even referred to, and\u00a0is simply not a factor, not even as a trying experience that somehow bonded us.\u00a0 This is not uncommon, I have found.\u00a0 A business associate and friend of mine today is a woman with whom I\u00a0was, shall\u00a0we say, close\u00a0as our respective first marriages were crumbling.\u00a0 When we socialize now, as a middle-aged Carly Simon ruefully sings: \u201cI don\u2019t try to seduce you\/ We don\u2019t even flirt.\u201d[3]\u00a0 I certainly appreciate her attractiveness,\u00a0but only\u00a0the friendship remains.\u00a0 If you live long enough, you can get over pretty much everything.<\/p>\n

Ella never married, I learn from Kate.\u00a0 She lives happily on the West Coast.\u00a0 I think what Ella thought she was doing with me was summed up by another female colleague of mine who spoke appreciatively once of all the boys she had kissed.\u00a0 At first blush I thought she meant all the boys she had had sex with.\u00a0 But then I reflected that this woman is quite unembarrassed about herself (I learned in more clinical detail than I cared for about a pregnancy of hers), and far freer with the expletives than I have ever been.\u00a0 If she had meant fucked, she would have said fucked.\u00a0 No, she meant kissed.\u00a0 She was telling me that there was a stage in her life when she had luxuriated in flirting with boys and sharing kisses with them.\u00a0 I believe that this was what I was to Ella: one of the boys she kissed.\u00a0 Something fun that she correctly surmised would wind up, quickly enough, in her rear-view mirror.\u00a0 And I now know that there was nothing wrong with that, though it was a little harder to accept at the time.<\/p>\n

Zsuska is not even mentioned between Kate and me now.<\/p>\n

I do not long for Ella or Kate.\u00a0 I long for the feelings I had then.\u00a0 I long for the intensity that a few strains of music could stir up in emotions, when love was as yet unachieved, when sex (a somewhat distinct thing) was terrain I was exploring at my own leisurely pace, when, in one\u2019s expectations (doomed though one might have sensed they would prove to be), embraces and endearments could lead to lifelong magic, magic in whose presence the music in one\u2019s head would never stop.<\/p>\n

\n

[1] \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it\u2019s accurate to speak of the Buckinghams as a rock band with brass the way Blood, Sweat & Tears or Chicago were. \u00a0When you look at videos of the Buckinghams from that era, all you see are the core guys, none of whom goes anywhere near a mouthpiece.\u00a0 The brass players must have been added in production, probably by James William Guercio, who became their producer toward the end of 1966 and who very shortly went on to produce both Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago, where the brass were full members of the band.<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0\u00a0 Out of the approximately 30 girls in my class we had four unwed mothers.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0\u00a0 From the song Happy Birthday<\/em> from the album Have You Seen Me Lately<\/em> (1990).\u00a0 There seem not to be any videos out there of her singing it.\u00a0 Buy it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for commercial images<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Buckinghams prophesy that \u201cGirl, I still love you,\/ I\u2019ll always love you,\/ Anyway.\u201d That\u2019s the way it feels at the time, but of course we all move on, especially from yearnings that afflict us in younger years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2275,2307,2306,2309,2311,2312,2310,2302,2305,2308,2304,2303],"class_list":["post-1941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-2275","tag-blood","tag-carly-simon","tag-chicago","tag-happy-birthday","tag-have-you-seen-me-lately","tag-james-william-guercio","tag-kind-of-a-drag","tag-sgt-pepper","tag-sweat-tears","tag-swooning","tag-the-buckinghams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1941"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5477,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1941\/revisions\/5477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}