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Day 88: Are You as “Unique” As I Am?
Today I was pronounced unique.
How does that relate to being a candy addict? Well Sheila said, “You are unique!” in reference to a choice I made that she thought was strange. It was just a throwaway comment on Facebook. (Not to be confused with a very early boyfriend who once called me an “iconoclast.” The term somehow seemed very elderly Somerset Maugham for someone who was 23, and female, at the time.)
Anyway, this brought to mind something another friend who’s an alcoholic and who is in his fourth month of not drinking once said.
He said he drank because of the way the world is. The way sometimes you feel so alienated from other people, or they just bore you to death, or you just feel so so different. Or because you’re… unique?
Is that why I’ve always needed something sweet to get through life? Because when you’re unique maybe everyone else isn’t unique enough?
The backstory: Sheila made her Facebook status update a query asking everyone to say what their favorite song was: “the sentimental grand-experience-marker, from an earlier time in (your) life, when emotional and bohemian Romance were everything.”
Sheila chose Laura Nyro’s Timer. For whatever reason, I read the question as being about a song that was your earliest favorite song, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have made the same choice as I did.
I chose a song from 1970 called Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes.) Because I remember that song corresponding to one of my earliest crushes, like in second grade in Massachusetts. His name was Joey Frontiera.
To me, elementary school was unbelievably romantic.
Imagine choosing Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) for a favorite romantic song in response to a Facebook query by a sophisticated media friend in New York?
Wait, does she know that Sugar, Sugar by the Archies is my idea of a perfect pop song? What a coincidence, given my lifelong vice!
In any event, when my friend responded to all of the comments – cool choices like Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row and Joni Mitchell’s River – she wrote that she couldn’t imagine my choice ever making such a list. You are unique! she wrote.
So I looked into the band behind my unique song, Edison Lighthouse
Below from the esteemed research center, Wikipedia:
Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” was written by Tony Macaulay Barry Mason and Sylvan Whittingham. Essentially they were a studio group with prolific session singer Tony Burrows providing the vocals. When the song became number one a group needed to be put together rapidly to feature on the popular TV show Top of the Pops. Sylvan Whittingham found a group called Greenfields and brought them to the auditions a week before Top of the Pops. Once chosen and rehearsed non stop they appeared on the show as ‘Edison Lighthouse’ to mime to the fastest climbing no 1 hit record in history. Burrows sang the song on the program, which happened to be his third appearance on the same show with three different groups. It reached number 5 on US pop chart, number 3 in Canada, and number 1 on the UK singles chart for five weeks in January and February 1970.
I was more intrigued when I checked out the lead singer, Tony Burrows, and found this interview entitled “The Greatest Singer Whose Name You Never Heard.” Burrows, it turned out, was the anti-Bob Dylan. No huge talent coupled with peerless ambition and savvy careerism here: Burrows was just the one singer in history to have four top 40 singles with four groups in a space of four months.
His favorite of all his hit singles? Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) of course.
If you must know, my very favorite song of all time is Into the Mystic, by Van Morrison.
But as much as I love that song, it doesn’t evoke the same “sentimental grand-experience-marker, from an earlier time in (your) life, when emotional and bohemian Romance were everything.”
Not the way Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Goes) does.
Am I also the only person who remembers the intensity of feeling you can have as a girl for another boy?
Am I that unique? Is my freak flag flying that high?
Can I say how much I love the people who totally get you and don’t think you’re unique? I can think of one right now.
By the way, I came thisclose to buying a can of whipped cream tonight.
C’est pas facile, cette vie.
Pour a little sugar on it baby.
And together we will float,
into the mystic.
Ta,
