If you like piña coladas...

Escape is the only song I remember from the old family collection of 45's that I still hear on any kind of a regular basis (and this is surely as it should be).

I always notice it when it comes on. I particularly notice the line "I'm nobody's poet" because when I was a kid I thought it said "I'm nobody's par wit" and I never knew what that meant. It kind of bugged me, but not enough to ever ask anyone about it and, obviously, at some point I figured it out on my own. (I had similar problems with "A bar called O'Malley's." [Abarful Omalleys?? What a stupid name for a restaurant...] Maybe Rupert Holmes needs to work on his enunciation.)

The song was on the radio this morning as I was sitting down at the computer and as usual I was enjoying it while pffft-ing at yoga and health food as deal-breakers. (I mean, Dude. YOU don't have to be into them, but so what if SHE is??)

And then I had this little mini revelation. Okay, you know the song, right? Stop for a minute and picture the people. The singer and his Lovely Lady. (If possible, without taking into account that the singer's name is Rupert, which I just learned.)

This was before the days of the music video, so you got to make up your own visuals. And once you did, of course, they were set in stone. It's like when you're reading a book and you've got the action set comfortably in your best friend's old house she used to live in when you were growing up. Then someone comes out of the kitchen and turns right into the living room and you get all disgruntled because it's totally not set up that way. So you decide to ignore it and hope that the floorplan doesn't play a pivotal role in the plot.

Oh, right. Music.

So you surely have your own visuals for The Piña Colada Song. If a video was ever made for it (and I suppose one eventually was, for karaoke purposes if nothing else) I never saw it. So to me, the guy is dark-haired (yup) and slick, you know, with a white suit (nope) and...well, actually I never really pictured him much beyond that. But I do have a clear picture of the Lady of whom he's grown tired. She's a large woman - tall, big boned and...well, not fat but just plain large. She's approaching middle age and has short curly hair, dyed blond (with, of course, dark roots). She wears a flowered housedress.

And since that's what I came up with when I used to listen to the record back in elementary school, that's how I've always pictured her. She's not the picture of traditional beauty, but she's his own Lovely Lady. (Interestingly, my sixth-grade science teacher--the one responsible for teaching us the mechanics of Human Reproduction--would turn out to be this very woman, minus the flowered housedresses.)

It wasn't until 25 years later--just this morning--that it occurred to me that someone who values piña coladas over health food (never mind perusing the personals while lying in bed with the current squeeze) may have had a different physiognomy in mind when penning the song. All of a sudden she's curvy and lush and exotic. Hawaiian, probably.

There goes another chunk of youthful innocence.