Sing Along with Mitch
When I was a kid grandma owned a house on the beach, and every summer I would stay with her. This is partly because the beach and teenagers make a perfect match, but it was also because my mom insisted. This was when Polio terrorized the country, before the vaccines, and my mom had it in her head that I would escape Polio if I spent my summer vacations at the beach instead of in the hot and stuffy suburbs.
I was never convinced of this theory, myself, given that it is a teenager’s wont to spend the daylight hours on the beach where everyone else from the suburbs and the city has gone. There are probably more people inhabiting a beach during summer than any other place on earth, and I figured polio went where the people went. But that was her thinking, and who was I to argue. Besides, I got to live on the beach, and I’m a surfer and a teenager. So, once school shut down for the summer, mom hustled me off to grandma’s house.
The daylight hours were filled with swimming and surfing and tanning and boating, which was great. Unfortunately, the nights were filled with absolutely nothing -- no places to go, no places to hide, no friends, no anybody, except grandma -- which was not great.
But grandma did have a TV and loved to sing and dance and wrestle. So each night grandma and I would watch Mitch Miller, Lawrence Welk, and professional wrestling -- a lot of professional wrestling. I still remember these TV Kodak moments like they were yesterday: grandma and grandson singing and dancing and wrestling.
“Sing Along with Mitch” was first on the evening agenda. With goatee, stiff body, maestro’s baton, and weird arm movements, Mitch looked more like Sigmund Freud conducting experiments on patients than a conductor. He would stand in front of an orchestra that wasn’t there, his entire body immobilized, at attention, unmoving, legs cemented together, head forward, coffinish -- except for his arms, which swung wildly and herky-jerkily in and out from his body like a doll with a tightly wound spring might do. Mitch belonged on a cuckoo clock tolling the hours or in a toy soldier parade marching stiffly, and not on stage. As a song would progress those elbows would go nuts, and he’d start getting the look of a mad scientist in his eyes, like he just thought of a really cool mad scientist experiment to perform on his unanesthetized viewers.
Together, grandma and I, along with Mitch and his all male chorale, would sing such oldies (even then) as “Those Lazy, Crazy Days of Summer,” “Has Anybody Seen my Gal,” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” Singing along with Mitch was easy because the words would display on the bottom of the screen with this ball bouncing from word to word so each of us could keep pace. No one was allowed to sing ahead of the bouncing ball. [THEY say there was no bouncing ball. THEY say I made it up. I say THEY are delusional, not I. Besides, I like the story better with the bouncing ball.] Mitch is probably responsible for more people singing off key at the same time than any other man or woman on the planet, including Britney.
Sing Along with Mitch was infectious. I could never get those songs out of my head. Any little thing might trigger a memory. I remember taking those region-wide school tests -- IQ tests, I think -- in the school auditorium. I would be waiting patiently and nervously along with hundreds of other students, when the proctor would say to us, “Please read the instructions in the test booklet to yourselves, while I read them aloud.” Wham! Immediately, I would be catapulted back to the beach -- “Please sing the song to yourselves, while I sing it aloud.” -- with Mitch conducting a make believe orchestra, arms flailing wildly in and out, like a puppet commanded by a puppeteer, while grandma and I sang to ourselves to the tempo of a bouncing ball and his all male chorale sang aloud.
Just because Sing Along with Mitch was before your time doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the moment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dY9gtYeHhk
It includes commercials, which are a trip in their own right.
Next, Lawrence Welk.
I was never convinced of this theory, myself, given that it is a teenager’s wont to spend the daylight hours on the beach where everyone else from the suburbs and the city has gone. There are probably more people inhabiting a beach during summer than any other place on earth, and I figured polio went where the people went. But that was her thinking, and who was I to argue. Besides, I got to live on the beach, and I’m a surfer and a teenager. So, once school shut down for the summer, mom hustled me off to grandma’s house.
The daylight hours were filled with swimming and surfing and tanning and boating, which was great. Unfortunately, the nights were filled with absolutely nothing -- no places to go, no places to hide, no friends, no anybody, except grandma -- which was not great.
But grandma did have a TV and loved to sing and dance and wrestle. So each night grandma and I would watch Mitch Miller, Lawrence Welk, and professional wrestling -- a lot of professional wrestling. I still remember these TV Kodak moments like they were yesterday: grandma and grandson singing and dancing and wrestling.
“Sing Along with Mitch” was first on the evening agenda. With goatee, stiff body, maestro’s baton, and weird arm movements, Mitch looked more like Sigmund Freud conducting experiments on patients than a conductor. He would stand in front of an orchestra that wasn’t there, his entire body immobilized, at attention, unmoving, legs cemented together, head forward, coffinish -- except for his arms, which swung wildly and herky-jerkily in and out from his body like a doll with a tightly wound spring might do. Mitch belonged on a cuckoo clock tolling the hours or in a toy soldier parade marching stiffly, and not on stage. As a song would progress those elbows would go nuts, and he’d start getting the look of a mad scientist in his eyes, like he just thought of a really cool mad scientist experiment to perform on his unanesthetized viewers.
Together, grandma and I, along with Mitch and his all male chorale, would sing such oldies (even then) as “Those Lazy, Crazy Days of Summer,” “Has Anybody Seen my Gal,” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” Singing along with Mitch was easy because the words would display on the bottom of the screen with this ball bouncing from word to word so each of us could keep pace. No one was allowed to sing ahead of the bouncing ball. [THEY say there was no bouncing ball. THEY say I made it up. I say THEY are delusional, not I. Besides, I like the story better with the bouncing ball.] Mitch is probably responsible for more people singing off key at the same time than any other man or woman on the planet, including Britney.
Sing Along with Mitch was infectious. I could never get those songs out of my head. Any little thing might trigger a memory. I remember taking those region-wide school tests -- IQ tests, I think -- in the school auditorium. I would be waiting patiently and nervously along with hundreds of other students, when the proctor would say to us, “Please read the instructions in the test booklet to yourselves, while I read them aloud.” Wham! Immediately, I would be catapulted back to the beach -- “Please sing the song to yourselves, while I sing it aloud.” -- with Mitch conducting a make believe orchestra, arms flailing wildly in and out, like a puppet commanded by a puppeteer, while grandma and I sang to ourselves to the tempo of a bouncing ball and his all male chorale sang aloud.
Just because Sing Along with Mitch was before your time doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the moment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dY9gtYeHhk
It includes commercials, which are a trip in their own right.
Next, Lawrence Welk.
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