Only
my mother could certify the fact that indeed I was not your average kid. And much as I know she appreciated that, it’s
quite possible that on occasion, she dreamed otherwise.
It
was the summer of 1977 when this Mountain Dew commercial, a very Clio-worthy
thirty second musical with slow motion cliff leaps into foamy streams, starring
a cast of absolutely young, gorgeous fashion-model bathing-suited teens cut
right through the fuzz on my mom’s 1961 black-n-white RCA portable. I was nine
years old, a perennial life-long Charlie Brown, never any friends, but lots of
unidentified enemies. My time was best
and most rewardingly spent alone with my imagination and action figures and
accessories. Most kids’ heroes back then
were Pele, Luke Skywalker and Steve Austin.
Mine were Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and Bob Dylan (“Hard Rain” sat atop
my 8-track pile). I was unfashionably overweight,
hair like a windstormed haystack, and I found the image of the Disco culture only
more disturbing than a circus of clowns and whipped, trained elephants. Earlier that year, my mother handed me her
1951 copy of Catcher In The Rye and said I might find the narrative
interesting. After two pages I decided I
could compose my own memoir the same way, only cleaner, and proceeded to do
so. After making the mistake of sharing
my work with my younger cousin, whose troublesome profile I disclosed in my
writing, his angered response shattered my memoir intentions for awhile. Every writer needs to learn a few hard early
lessons. Even Salinger went into hiding
afterward.
And
now here we were in our quaint, humid little flat, me hundreds of miles from my
one or two prior block friends, the only ones who came close to “getting me”. Now it was all Bad Day At Black Rock,
for the most part. Thank goodness my mom
at least got me. But even then, she
could, almost despite herself sometimes, leave me stranded. Like when this ad flowered upon us.
This
gorgeous, technicolor splash hit the screen (in rustic black & white..),
the folk tune chirping “Gimme a mountain, and nothin’ to do..” as the hot
models dived, splashed and guzzled from long-necked bottles of a beverage
commonly known as the sugar-coma-inducing bloat-intensive soft drink to end
them all. And my mom in her dreamy M-G-M-musical-scored
brainscape says to me, “You know, I picture you as one of those kids one day…”
While
portions of me characteristically wrote it off in “yeah, right..” fashion, unable
to ever see my self image in the hot, sexy pictoral, for the first time, unidentified
portions of me became offended.
Was
this image preferable to the image I currently held.? Was I supposed to pine and scale myself
toward that hot, beautiful, perfect-haired, rail-thin, six-pack-ab’d image to
become worthy in even my mother’s eyes, let alone that of general society..?
Moreover,
did my mother, a woman veering into her post-alcoholic AA years and learning in
her late forties to embrace recovery, unable to see that 1970s youth image for
what it was misrepresenting itself as..?
Somehow, at my tender, formidable age, life in these 1970s taught me
enough about What Kids Are Really Doing amongst one another by a creek at that
age. And if they’ve got long-necked
Mountain Dew bottles with them, Mountain Dew is definitely not what they’re
swilling from the inside. And their
other packed treats aren’t exactly Mallomars.
Did
she really not know this..? Was my
mother, a notably well-read sophisticate who couldn’t stop lecturing me at her
leisure (and mine) about Emily Bronte and Henry James, unable to recognize the
poison of the advertised image..?
I
never did become one of those goodtime hotties.
Years later, when I actually tried some Mountain Dew, I certainly didn’t
know how anyone swilling that stuff could deep dive off a cliff into a stream and
swim for their life. But the day I heard
my mom swoon over that ad and her romantic image of her son’s pending teenhood,
I was bolstered with the best inner response possible. I was proud to know one thing: I’d never be
them. And with due respect to the great
actors in that commercial, I’m pretty sure none of them ever were either. We were probably all much more like each
other than we realized.
It's
amazing how right mothers can be.
Noah F.
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