I'm Young, and I Love to be Young

I get every other Friday off from work these days, so every other Thursday night is my Friday night. And I love Thursday/Friday nights, and the feeling of freedom and infinite possibilities that either something amazing will happen over the weekend, or that I will catch up on some sleep!

I picked up Elsa after work on Thursday and on the way home, I was (as is my custom) blasting my burned CD, which is a hodge podge of random songs I like and then a few that I figured would amuse Elsa while we were driving.

This song came on, the one in the video above (it’s a video, because blogger won’t upload a music file, so you have to make it a video to get it on there). I started singing it, because when I first burnt it to the CD I was thinking Elsa might get a kick out of it (the words actually say, “don’t tell me what to do” and that has Elsa all over it!) I like to sing it because in the last few months, with the crap that happens and the memories of why I walked out the door, and all the …stuff…ok, well let’s just say the song was used in the movie for a reason. It’s a great divorce anthem, but not really even divorce. It’s a great, “I am a girl, but that doesn’t mean I am going to forget who I am and lose myself for you (again) kind of song.” I mean, think about it, this song came out in 1963…one year after my least favorite pop song “Johnny Get Angry” (lyric sample: Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad, give me the biggest lecture I’ve ever had, I need a brave man, I need a cave man!) so…well thank you Feminine Mystique!

The song was on and the line “And when I go out with you, don’t put me on display.” And Elsa asked me what it meant. I tripped over the explanation, and I will spare you the details, but I told her as accurately as I could. And when the song was over, not only did she ask if I would play it again, so told me (as if she had to, I would have anyway) to sing. And when that song was over, she insisted I sing again. And again. I think we went through it four times.

I was in a particularly light mood, with it being Thursday and all, and so I was vocally blasting and dancing as much as one can while holding a steering wheel steady. And every time I happened to look in my rearview mirror, I saw my daughter leaning her head back and staring out an open car window, smiling, while the wind blew her hair back.