What I thought was nothing more than the re-broadcasting of an old clip proved to be far more prophetic than I could have guessed when Meredith Viera yucking it up about Bette Midler's new show had me humming "Mr. Rockefeller" as I went about my morning routine. Recognizing the daily earworm at work but, unfortunately, unable to get to it due to my morning routine expanding to include five very demanding puppies who have no time for songs or my ramblings about them. Looking anxiously at the clock, I tucked it all away for the famous "later" that currently houses an awful lot things to which I've yet to get.
My mother often jokes that she erased any thoughts of me being gay because I never liked Judy Garland. She failed to note that Bette Midler's appearance on some award show or other around 1976, a giant turntable hat atop her shocking head, was just the sort of jolt a budding gay boy needs to get his head around a few facts. The next day, I ran to the store to find anything by this bizarre apparition and snagged a copy of "Songs For The New Depression", and ran home to fall in love with side one, track three; "Mr. Rockefeller".
To me, no amount of tongue in cheek can erase the beautiful sadness of this song, with its dashed dreams so beautifully played out via a one-sided telephone conversation. There's plenty of self-pity, self-entitlement, and plain old selfishness but as the anxiety in Bette's voice frantically fans the dying fire in her belly, I can't help but feel all of it right along with her.
It's to "Mr. Rockefeller" I turn when I am faced with airing number
eleventy hundred of ghastliness like "From A Distance" and "Wind Beneath My Wings", or worse, another broadcast of "Beaches"; to the bawdy broad fighting so hard for attention that she wore a turntable as a hat and somehow changed a kid's whole world.
And now that I know that, come January 9th, I will have a lot more time to get to all that later I've been storing, I hope to find a way to fan my own fires. Fortunately, I am a man of many hats, and I'm not afraid to call collect.
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