Why I have to Listen to National Public Radio in the Car
I have a bad track record when it comes to getting caught trying to sing. I have no natural sense of pitch or rhythm and only a vague memory of proper lyrics. Unfortunately, this does not prevent me from making ill-advised attempts at singing from time to time, usually when there is the greatest opportunity for me to make an ass out of myself.
A case in point:
Once, many years ago, I taught school in East Africa. It was impressed upon me when I took the job, that as I would be living on school grounds, I would be an object of great curiosity to the students and other faculty members. I should, therefore, conduct myself at all times with the greatest degree of decorum possible.
One afternoon, about two months into my visit, I took a bath before going out to dinner. I had just had a conversation with another teacher about local architecture and the fact that, due to termite problems, almost all buildings in the area were made of masonry. My mental processes being what they are, one thing led to another while I was in the tub and I found myself performing an a capella rendition of “She’s a Brick House” by the Commodores.
I don’t know if you are familiar with this particular song, but if you ever find yourself in such a situation, it is vitally important to insert the letter “w” into the word “house” – “She’s a brick (pause) HOWWWSE…” which, a bar or so later, allows you to change the phrase “mighty, mighty” to “My-Tay, My-Tay” which in turn allows you to reproduce the proper bass line with a series of “Bohmp, bohmp” sounds. I did all these thing on this occasion and went a step further, inserting a set of percussive splashing and gargling solos.
I left my cottage half an hour later to discover an audience of students and groundskeepers staring at me in slack-jawed amazement, having heard the entire performance through my open bathroom window.
On another occasion, several years later, I was stuck in traffic in Manchester. From time to time, I go through experimental musical phases, where I listen to a particular type of music over and over for weeks at a time until I squeeze every drop of entertainment value from it. During this particular period, I had been listening to an inordinate amount of Cajun music and was singing along to a particularly lively song on my tape deck at the top of my lungs.
Now, I don’t actually speak French, but the old ladies in the car next to me obviously did. Furthermore, whatever the central message of my song was, written as it probably was by drunken, bayou-dwelling misanthropes, it had probably been decades since these ladies had been propositioned in quite so colorful a manner.
Their tires actually squealed as they tried to put some distance between our cars as the lights changed.
Not even classical music offers complete safety from this sort of humiliation, as the people in the next car found out in August of 1994 as I took paint to a construction site in a delivery van. My favorite classical station was playing the greatest works of Rossini and I was delighted when they played the opening movement to the William Tell Overture. I’ve always liked this piece of music, so I turned it up louder, rocking back and forth to the music, then even louder as the music swelled, belting out nonsense syllables to accompany it.
What the people in the next car saw was a Sherwin Williams van rocking back and forth to the blaring sounds of the Lone Ranger’s theme song.
I’m pretty sure they reported me to the police.
As a result, now I mostly listen to National Public Radio on my way to and from work. Its all-news format is not only safer in terms of public humiliation, but has also earned me a measure of respect. Each morning, the business report analyzes the previous day’s stock market and plays a particular song if the Dow Jones has gone up or down. Because the songs tend to stick in my head, if anyone at work asks me how the market did the day before, all I have to do is remember what song I was whistling when I came through the door and I can tell them. They are usually very impressed. I may have finally found my niche.
As James Brown would say, if he too was an NPR nerd, I got soul and I’m super-bad.
