Third Time's A Charm

   I like to sing.  Unfortunately, I was heavily influenced by parody songs thanks to listening to Dr. Demento when I was young as well as listening to and watching "Weird Al" Yankovic videos.  As a result, I tend to make up words to songs, even though I know the lyrics.

   When I sing with the choir, I've usually had the song drilled into me that I automatically sing the correct words, although I keep the music in front of me in case I'm tempted to goof up.  Choir practice has many times been disrupted by my giggling fits due to me substituting words for what we should be singing.  They haven't kicked me out, although I guess practices would be shorter if I behaved myself.

   A few weeks ago I read, on the Internet where everything is true, that BC Clark, an Oklahoma City jewelry store, was going to be filming people singing their famous (at least to those who grow up in parts of Oklahoma that receives TV and radio broadcasts from OKC) jingle at Penn Square Mall the day after Thanksgiving this year.  Since I was going to be visiting my dad in Edmond, I decided to take the kids to the mall and sing on Friday.

   We got to the mall without mishap, but trying to find a place to park was horrible. I'm not a Black Friday shopper and I thought that if the parking lot was crowded people would go somewhere else and come back when the parking thinned out.  Nope. There were people parking at the ends of rows, making up their own parking places and making it almost impossible for anything bigger than a Mini-Cooper to get by.  And there were people who decided to jump the curbs and park on the hilly, grassy areas between the parking lot and the street.  And, of course, there were people who lurked about, stalking shoppers walking out to their cars, then planting themselves in the middle of the lane while impatiently waiting for the shoppers to load up and leave.

   I got lucky, as I usually do, by remaining patient. We found a spot that opened up just as we turned down the aisle, and we weren't too far from an entrance into the mall.  It probably took us twenty minutes to find the spot, but we were good to go.

   Once inside the mall, it took about fifteen minutes to find where we needed to be.  Ten minutes of wandering and five minutes more after my kids said, "Hey, Dad, why don't we look at a map of the mall?"

   We got to our destination, signed the release, and waited for our turn to sing.  We knew the song by heart, so we didn't even ask for a run-through.

   The cameras were pointed at us, we were given the signal, and we began to sing a capella.

   As I mentioned at the start of this, part of my misspent youth included listening to song parodies, and I've developed a case of what I've explained to the kids as "Musical Tourette Syndrome."  I know the right words, and I often mean to sing the right words, but I just start singing the wrong words.
  
   Anyway, we were making it through the song all right until we hit the last line and instead of singing "...BC Clark's Anniversary Sale!" I sang "...GC Clark's Anniversary Sale!"

   The kids started laughing.

   The director said, "Let's do another take."

   I said, "Oh dear, did I say 'GC Clark?"

   The director nodded while my kids were trying to supress giggles.

   So we began Take Two. The song is not intended to be sung as rounds, like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," but the three of us began at three different times, with me singing something completely different.

   "Oops!"

   More giggles.

   "Okay, I'll count you in," said the director.

   And the third time was a charm.

   I don't know if they'll use our correct version for the TV spot this year, but we sure had fun doing it.  

...I wonder if they've ever considered putting together blooper reels?

Whatcha Doin?

   “What did you do today?” was a question my mom asked a lot when I was a kid.

   “Nothing,” was my most frequent reply.

   When I ask my kids the question, and they give me the “Nothing” answer, I follow it up with my reply which goes something like:

   “Nothing?  Really?  Do you know how hard it is to do nothing all day?  There are so many things to do, you probably spent a good deal of energy avoiding doing them just so you could do nothing.”

   I learned, or rather taught myself, that doing nothing is not all that easy.  Even if I slept all day, at least it was something - and would be quite an accomplishment because I’m a daylight person.  If it’s light outside, I’m probably active.

   Reflecting on what I've done all day, although my mom doesn't ask me any more, is really a good brain exercise.  I have a pretty good memory, and I like to keep it in shape.  It comes in handy sometimes - like earlier this week when a good buddy from grade school asked if anybody had some good memories of the summer our 6th grade baseball team went from years of a “Charlie Brown” team to finally making it to the city championship.
  
   I did have a memory to share - a vivid one - of a certain game that ended after four innings.  It was more than just a rain out, it was a baseball-sized hail, lightning-flashing, frog-strangler of a rain out   I can still remember being pelted by hail (fortunately, I got hit by the dime-sized hail and not the bigger stuff, although something of a decent size nearly knocked my ball cap down over my eyes).

   I have lots of memories that I like to share, some of which I include on this blog page.  Some of the stories have been repeated around the table when getting together with family.  I've included some of them in past, and I’ll probably write down more.  There are some family favorites (or maybe it’s my ability to tell the tale) that get repeated often - like the time I thought I was going to have to dig to China, and the various DIY projects with my dad and sister that managed to somehow go awry, injuries that could have been worse, etc.

   But one of the keys to recalling these memories is to occasionally sit back and reflect on what happened.  And to recall the feelings, the colors, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, and anything else of those events.

   So if you see me sometime and it looks like I’m doing nothing, there’s a good chance that my mind is whirling through events - of the day, or possibly of the past.  I’m always up to something - or so I've been told. 

   Can’t argue with that.

There Will Be Blood

   Just a couple of days until I donate some blood to the Oklahoma Blood Institute (OBI).  I took an extra few weeks between donations so I could be in this Fall's Bedlam Blood Drive between OSU and OU. 

   It doesn't take long to give blood.  Plus, there will be Hideaway pizza, other snacky things, t-shirts, and I believe a chance to win tickets to this years OSU-OU Bedlam Football game down in Norman.

   If you live in or around Stillwater, come to Gallagher-Iba Arena or Kerr-Drummond and give up some blood.  You might save a life.  And your blood gets replaced pretty quickly, so why not just do it?

Just My Imagination

   When I was a kid, I used to love to lie down on the floor under the Christmas tree and look up through the branches and watch all the lights and the reflections in the ornaments, imagining they were all distant stars and planets, each celebrating Christmas.  Occasionally, my dog would join me and, although I’m not sure he was thinking of stars and planets, we would both gaze upward, captivated by the whole scene.

   One Christmas, when I was probably nine or ten, I got the coolest flashlight.  It wasn’t like a regular flashlight - a skinny tube with a light at one end and a switch on the side.  No, this one was round, like a cookie about three inches in diameter, and about a quarter of an inch thick - probably just barely enough to get AAA batteries inside.  The light was on the side and the on/off button, as I recall, was on the top (or bottom, depending how you looked at it).  It had a sci-fi look and feel to it.  I loved it.

   I would sneak out of my room before anybody was up and prowl around the house, drawn to the living room where the Christmas tree stood in its piney-scented splendor.  I’d plug the lights in and once again let my imagination take me away to other worlds with other kids and their other-Christmas celebrations.

   That year, though, we stopped getting the newspaper.  Missing the house once in a great while was no big deal.  My dad would call down to the newspaper and somebody would drop by with a paper, apologizing for the inconvenience.  But this happened several days in a row.

   Finally, the paperboy came by to collect and asked if we were okay.  My dad was puzzled, and the kid said he thought we’d been burglarized and had been too scared to deliver the paper because he thought the burglar saw him and would come after him.

   Putting two and two together, my parents figured out that the “burglar” was me, creeping about the dark house with my cool new flashlight.  I guess once or twice I must have shined that light out the windows and right into the paperboy’s face.

   I guess I wasn’t the only kid with a good imagination that year.