One of the delightful small gifts of retirement—and there are many—is to run into former colleagues from back in the workday.
Just last week, my shopping cart crossed paths with a former fellow worker. I smiled hello to her and her spouse, and then, hardly missing a beat, our conversation continued as if we were back on the job.
We stood there trading pleasantries as well as some of the current events in our retired lives. At some point, I mentioned my granddaughter Adelaide and her theater ambitions. I thought my colleague might be interested as she had been involved in producing plays at the middle school where we had worked.
I told her about the act eleven-year-old Adelaide and her two friends had developed for the school talent show. The three friends sang “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” while doing self-choreographed dance moves while wearing costumes they had created. Alas, Grandma Becky and I hadn’t been able to be there in person, but my daughter Rachel had thoughtfully sent us a video of the performance. I was pleased to realize they were singing rather than lip-syncing the Cyndi Lauper song. The lyrics were clear and their voices were right on. It was a marvelous performance I said as an admittedly biased grandpa.
I had an additional reason I was particularly happy to share the Adelaide story with this former co-worker. When I first learned the fifth-grade trio was doing “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” my mind went back to the early 1980s. That was when my late first wife Lesley, also a teacher at the school, and this colleague recorded the same song.
The two were chaperoning middle school newspaper staff students on an end-of-the-year field trip to Kings Island. Apparently, that day Lesley was a bit cautious about getting on the amusement park rides but eventually, she rode them all. As I recall, she was wary of any action where there was some perceived risk involved. She had to think things through. But after weighing everything, she usually would plunge in. The risk versus the thrill. Perhaps that was the situation when the two chaperones decided to make the recording.
After I watched Adelaide’s video, I found Cyndi Lauper’s original 1983 music video on YouTube. Watching her sing and dance took me back to a place where colors were as bright and wild as Cyndi’s red hair and as unruly as her frantic dance movements. Music videos hadn’t been around long, and the music and the stories seemed so young, so new, so full of possibility. Just as we young beginning teachers felt.
The recording booth allowed one rehearsal which the chaperones took. Then it was showtime. They knew the song so well they worked the nuances into their lyric phrasings. I am told neither had rehearsed the bit in the song where Cyndi throws in some high hiccup-like sounds, but just at the end of their recording Lesley ad-libbed a couple of hiccups. They couldn’t stop laughing.
Girls just want to have fun.
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
