I was saddened to read that Annette Charles passed away yesterday at age 63 of complications from cancer. Annette Charles, for those of you that don't know, is perhaps best known for her portrayal of bad girl Cha Cha DiGregorio in the film adaptation of Grease.
I think you need scientific notation to most succinctly express how many times I watched Grease as a kid. It was on HBO every other day and I swear I watched it every time it was on. Most of that was due to my intense love of Olivia Newton-John during that time, but I also loved the music and the melodrama that the movie version of Grease delivers. I've owned the soundtrack on just about every possible format and I know for a fact that we had multiple copies of the record album growing up. Simply put, it was a very influential movie for me even though now it is kind of dismissed as lightweight and "girly." WTFE.
The thing that always gets me about the movie is how watching it now, you realize that all the leads (and, to be honest, pretty much all the actors playing high schoolers) were too old for these roles. Rather than being high school students at the dance, they look like they should be chaperones for the dance. I never really noticed that during any of my umpteen viewings of Grease until I got older. I remember being a kid and wondering what my high school years would be like and if they would be anything like those in Grease. Let me assure you that they were most decidedly NOT. No one every spontaneously broke into song in my lunchroom.
The most surprising thing I read in hearing about Annette Charles' death is that she became a speech professor at California State University, Northridge. I'm always fascinated when celebrities return to the real world so-to-speak. I wonder how many of her students knew that she was Cha Cha to so many of our generation. I can't imagine that she broadcast that information. She certainly didn't need to be ashamed of it though. We loved to hate her in that role.
RIP Cha Cha. Because of that small role in a major movie musical, you will never be forgotten by anyone in my generation.
We colored eggs this morning which, for the record, I don't really like doing a terrible lot. I dislike most of the stuff associated with Easter. Easter candy kind of annoys me. I've never been one for egg hunts or anything like that - probably because I was always too old for them at our church growing up while my younger brother and sister were not. I'm kind of dreading having to fill plastic eggs after Anna goes to sleep tonight because yes, Virginia, she still believes in the Easter Bunny and who am I to crush that? After a bit of obligatory bitching, I kind of got into the spirit of it though. It was kind of fun to blow out the eggs yolks (every time we try to hard boil them, they crack plus no one here eats hard boiled eggs) and I got to go around annoyingly saying the word "PAAS" over and over again until my wife and daughter were ready to hit me with a brick.
It got me to thinking about the time when I was probably in the 5th grade and for whatever reason, we decorated eggs in my Lutheran Sunday School class. We didn't do the dyes as that would have been far too messy for our Sunday best. Instead, there were crayons and markers and little bits of discarded fabric and other crafty items that we could glue onto our eggs.
Amidst all the crap that they had for us to decorate our eggs with was a small scrap of fabric that was a golden band with a little fringe on the edge. To me, it looked just like a sweat band, with hair going over the top of it. Those of you who know me well know where this is going. Yep, that's right...
...it was OLIVIA NEWTON-EGG.
I remember drawing the face on it and putting a little cartoon balloon down by the mouth and it was saying "Let's Get Physical." Oh my God, I took so much grief from my Sunday School classmates. And oddly, I had almost completely forgotten about it until this morning. That's how deeply buried in my subconscious it was.
Of course, I told this story to Heidi and she laughed uproariously. And, as is her standard retort when I tell stories like this, she said "And yet, somehow, you turned out straight." She added "Seriously, Dan, that's the type of story a gay man of our age would tell!" followed by "I fucking love you SO MUCH." It worked out best for everybody involved that I did turn out straight - especially Anna who wouldn't be here otherwise. I chalk it up to having only one functioning copy of the gay gene. It gets to the part where it codes for the sexual orientation bit and it just spits out a nonsense protein. And if that is not geeky humor, I don't know what is.
Now that I've completely humiliated myself, I think I'll just leave everyone with a Happy Easter if you are celebrating it. May you not eat your weight in chocolate eggs.
I'm 80% through my run of night shifts and hopefully I won't jinx tonight by saying that they really haven't been all that awful. As predicted, I hit my nadir on the third night (I was SO tired on Monday morning) and am actually feeling pretty good headed into the last one. I've slept pretty well for the most part as well - something that is not always easy to do. Thanks to Ativan, I slept blissfully for 6 hours today which is more sleep than I get on some nights.
But working the night shift has caused me to neglect my life. Dirty clothes are strewn all over my office, clean clothes need to be put away. I haven't read a word of the book I'm reading and have only blogged once. I did manage to get the tonnage of pop bottles and cans back to the store which netted me a massive $3.75. When that's your biggest accomplishment, you know you're in trouble.
And how all this ties into "Heart Attack" I have no idea, but I listened to that song randomly this afternoon and just knew that I had to blog about it. I think it might have something to do with the fact that we sang a Cliff Richard song at UU on Sunday (I forced myself to stay awake so I could go to our minister's second-to-last service.) The more I thought about it, the more I wished that if we were going to sing a Cliff Richard song, I wish it would have been his duet with ONJ, "Suddenly", but hey, I'm not on the program committee.
I remember getting the single for "Heart Attack" without having even heard it - that's how sold on Olivia I was as a kid. If it had her name attached to it, I was sure to like it. Well, I got the single home from the store and I have to admit, I didn't really like it all that much. In fact, I liked the B-side, an album track from Physical called "Stranger's Touch" (video here, amazingly cheeseball) much better, even though the bridge-ish section in "Stranger's Touch" where sing sings "he's overpowering me/what'll I do-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo." always made me feel kind of bad for Olivia.
But I eventually warmed to "Heart Attack" playing it no less than 12 million times as a kid which is something my folks can verify. It's still only an "ok" ONJ song, but it does contain one of my favorite misheard lyrics. I always thought that in the chorus she sang, "You get a mere heart attack" instead of "You're giving me a heart attack." I remember asking my dad what "mere" meant and even though it didn't make sense in the context, I went with it because it was all I could do. At least it's no "I got debated by your heartache" in that this one at least makes some kind of sense.
The video, as was the standard for almost all of ONJ's videos, was bizarre - a combination of 80s cliches and serious WTF moments. Plus, the mullet was SUCH a bad idea.
But, much like the other artists in my core, I'm a fan for life.
For whatever reason, today just never really seemed to start. And oddly enough, it's not because did what I normally do on my day off from work - sleeping easy, doing nothing. (It's attractive.) I was oddly productive today, getting out to the grocery store pretty much first thing, followed by mailing a package and depositing a check. I also finished my proof from Dreamspinner that I've been working on. But for whatever reason, I just can't shake the funk off today.
I think a lot of it has to do with the weather. It's COLD today. 51 degrees for May 10th is unseasonably cold. It FROZE the other night - something that while not unprecedented is also not common. It's gray and rainy and were this a fall day, I'd be reveling in it. But instead, it's supposed to be spring and it today feels like a step backward. From what, I'm not sure, but a step backward nonetheless.
Another thing that is really getting me is that despite having 8 days off of work, I am still operating on a significant sleep deficit. And I've finally figured out where my sleep deficit comes from - it comes from my early shifts. It's not so bad getting up at 5AM, even though I vowed when I was in college that I would never have a job that required me to report to work prior to 9AM. Life never goes quite like you expect it to and your ability to adapt to it is directly proportional to your success. But getting up at 5AM requires me really to not only be in bed no later than 10PM but honestly, I need to be sawing logs by 10PM. That just doesn't happen. In my younger days (read: my early 30s) I could handle this, but it's been one of the first real signs of aging that I've felt. So I end up going to bed at 11:30PM or midnight and wondering why I'm tired the next day.
Of course, all this sets me up for failure because not being well rested affects pretty much every other aspect of your health - both physical and mental. It messes me up and takes the smart part of my brain offline and puts the more primitive parts of my brain in charge. This is exactly what leads to anxiety, depression and general crabbiness.
I went out with Heidi to the chiropractor this morning and I was listening to Olivia Newton-John, having been put in the mood by last week's Glee, and the song "Not Gonna Give In To It" came on. It's a latter day Olivia song, recorded long after her hit-making days were behind her. It comes from the album Gaia, which was written almost wholly in response to her experience with breast cancer. I love this song because it has a positive message without seeming like a platitude - this isn't "a smile is a frown turned upside down" territory. I like the honest confession that we really are alone in our troubles. Others can support us, but we're ultimately the ones that have to do the work. Witness:
And I feel so alone For although you care No one else can share It's my own misery In the end it's all up to me
I never even knew this song until I saw Olivia in concert with my sister Wendy in 2005. The performance of this song was electrifying and fit in well with all the oldies. While this performance isn't quite as good as the one we saw, it's the best one I can find on YouTube.
Really, I live a charmed live. I'm amazingly lucky, but much like everyone else in the world, it's not always a walk in the park. It's times like these that I remember what my grandfather always used to say "Life is great as long as you don't weaken." And to tell you the truth, that's really just another way of saying "I'm not gonna give in to it."
Grandpa and Olivia - what a strange pair they would have made!
Xanadu references are all over the place these days. Between XO's post about Sharleen Spiteri's "gonad shrinking" cover of the song and multiple references across the blogosphere comparing the new Goldfrapp songs to "Xanadu" (they say that like it's a bad thing), you really can't escape it.
There are certainly worse things in life.
I went searching for the Xanadu finale on YouTube, which was harder to find than I thought it might be. As I said over on Facebook, it's 8 minutes of cheese at its absolute finest. You owe it to yourself to watch it. Wait for Mrs. Ming the Merciless at about 6:50.
I saw Xanadu at the Carroll theater when I was probably 8 years old. My mom took me to it and I remember nearly nothing of seeing it, but I do remember it being played about a half a million times on HBO, which is where I consumed it in exceptionally large doses. Forced to be totally honest, the movie really is pretty awful. Olivia Newton-John is not an exceptional actress (although she acts circles around Michael Beck as her love interest) and the story features just about every recycled Hollywood cliche there is. But for some reason, it's better than it should be. Panned at the time, it's somehow managed to become a cult classic.
I maintain that if it weren't for the music, this movie would be completely forgotten. We had the Xanadu soundtrack on 8-track cassette tape and for years that was the only version of the soundtrack we had. I purchased it on cassette tape in 1991 and it was eaten by my Walkman about 2 weeks after I purchased it. A year later, I found a used vinyl copy of it in a record store which I still own today. Finding the soundtrack on CD was a quest that seemed nearly impossible until I found an import copy of it in the Iowa City Best Buy. The sound quality was fair at best but it was on CD! It was ultimately properly released in the U.S. with pristine sound quality and that's the version I have today.
But one of my favorite (and most enduring) stories of Xanadu is how I subjected Heidi to the movie very VERY early in our relationship. We'd probably been dating a couple of months and I very excitedly - probably too excitedly - invited her over to watch Xanadu with me. Bless her, she tolerated it with great finesse and I think she actually liked it a little bit. Although looking back, she was probably just enamored with me. That was also the night we looked at my French copy of the Sex book. If you're looking for a moment where the deal was probably sealed, I think that was it - Heidi would probably agree. In who else's life besides mine would that happen?
The good news is that Olivia can still sing this song. Although her voice is showing some signs of aging, she's a great live act - one that I would go see again in a heartbeat. She appreciates her role as nostalgia act and milks it for every last bit that she can. For you, Xanadu.
For the most part, this summer has been kind of a let down for me as far as new music goes. Oh, sure there are a few songs that have just been released that have kind of redeemed the summer. Up until "Celebration", there was no "song of the summer" like there was the year that "Two Times Blue" dominated my listening habits all summer. As far as 2009 goes, I grew pretty fond of Cascada's "Evacuate the Dancefloor" (it definitely fell into the "if loving this is wrong, I don't wanna be right" camp), but it had a pretty limited shelf life as I anticipated it would. And now if you combine "Celebration" with new Bananarama and new Whitney Houston, things are turning around a little bit.
Apparently, the unifying theme of what I'm liking this summer is "everything old is new again." That makes me feel kind of old honestly, as if the next words out of my mouth are going to be "I don't know what it is with kids these days." Seriously, I am not that cranky. The problem with the new music this summer is that it has been almost what I want. And much like someone almost hitting the right notes, that has made it just that much more grating.
So continuing in the previously mentioned theme, this song arrived on my radar the other day. I haven't the foggiest notion who DJ Agent 86 is, but man, do I recognize those vocals. It is ONJ's "Magic" and it was one of the defining songs of my childhood. Only now, it is all grown up and ready for the dancefloor. Olivia's vocals don't start until about 1:40, so be patient.
At first I found it to be a bit cheaply done, but the more I listen to it, the more the production really fits. It's kind of a dub, but not really. It uses just enough of the vocal to be recognizable, but not so much that it ends up being the original song put over a generic backbeat.
It really got me to thinking that someone - anyone, really - needs to go through Olivia's back catalog and spice up a lot of her songs in this fashion. Lord knows I'd plunk down my hard earned cash for them.
This is one of my all time favorite Olivia Newton-John songs, one that is sadly been mostly forgotten.
"Livin' In Desperate Times" is such a product of its time it's not even funny. Those cheesy 80s synths, her incredibly large hair, and odds are good that there are some shoulder pads underneath that blue coat. But oddly enough, I think it plays very well now, probably due to the fact that it was not overplayed like "Physical" (which I can only really listen to in its - as Olivia refers to it now - "age appropriate version.") and some of her other more popular songs. I have particularly been enjoying the extended remix (which I have as a vinyl rip) because the version from the CD release of the soundtrack of Two of a Kind is heinously edited.
While the song is great, the movie it comes from is pretty horrible. Two of a Kind was the hotly anticipated on-screen reunion with John Travolta, but the storyline involving an angry God bent on destroying the world unless angels portrayed by Scatman Crothers, Beatrice Straight and Charles Durning can find two honest souls is just God-awful. The dialogue is horrible and while they do their best with what they have, this is not a high point for either Travolta or Olivia. But do you think that stopped me? Heck no. I saw it at least twice in the theater and countless times on HBO.
This song was kind of the beginning of the end for Olivia. Her hitmaking days were at this point rapidly coming to a close. She'd squeak a top 20 hit out of "Soul Kiss" but nothing since then. And it hasn't been for lack of trying. In 1992, she released a retrospective with 4 new songs, fully intending to tour and make a comeback, only to be sidelined by breast cancer. "I Need Love" (to make the sex right) was one of those songs.
Fortunately, Olivia survived her brush with cancer and has toured extensively in recent years. She's a great live act and one I would see again in a heartbeat!
("Twist of Fate" was the bigger hit from this project for Olivia. Whenever I play it, Heidi gets it stuck in her head.)
When I was taking Anna to school this morning, Olivia Newton-John's "Hopelessly Devoted To You" from Grease came up semi-randomly on the iPod. I say semi-randomly because it is on the Band Fags! playlist and as a result, I have kind of rediscovered the song. It was always kind of a favorite for me because it is so melodramatic! I remember knowing the song prior to seeing the movie and my mom told me that Olivia "sang it when she was out in the yard." Having no context, I just imagined her walking through something that looked like our backyard in broad daylight. It makes infinitely more sense in context (as most things do.)
When I was a kid, I LOVED Grease. My mom took me to see the movie in rerelease in about 1979 or so and after that, I watched it whenever it was on TV. My dad loves to tell the story of how we purchased that soundtrack more times than any other album we owned when I was growing up. I will admit that a good 50% of the draw for Grease was Olivia Newton-John. I couldn't help it - I was in love.
I haven't watched Grease in an age. I know that it is supposed to play like 50s nostalgia, but for me, it has always played like 70s nostalgia. While the movie has not aged incredibly well for me, the music is still pretty timeless.
Here's Olivia performing "Hopelessly Devoted To You" on what my sister and I affectionately refer to as "The Mullet Tour." I desperately wanted to go to that tour as a kid (it stopped in Ames) but alas it was not to be. 25 years later, I would see Olivia in Cedar Rapids and it is still one of my favorite concert experiences.
As a kid, I watched that concert on HBO till my eyes fell out of my head. Sadly, it is not available on DVD, although some of the performances are on the Olivia Video Gold DVDs. Speaking of which, if you want cheesy videos, that is your one stop candy shop.
Before Madonna, there was Olivia. ONJ was my very first celebrity crush, the first in a long line of crushes. I don't know what it was that initally drew me to her. It was probably the ubiquitousness of Grease during my formative years. I was powerless to resist the story of Sandy transforming from goody-two-shoes to sexpot in tight pants (that zipped up the back no less!) "Physical" was the first 45rpm single that I ever purchased, and as I've detailed in a previous post, Olivia's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 was the first album I ever bought with my own money.
The greatest hits albums are the safest bet with Olivia. Her studio albums are all a bit hit and miss, usually a couple of hits surrounded by massive amounts of album filler. This is especially true of her early albums, back when she was a "country" artist. I have quite a few of these albums but they rarely get listened to because I just cannot abide by those breathy vocals. But there is one album that stands out amongst the rest. For my money, her best studio album is and will always be Totally Hot.
Let's just get the obvious out of the way. She is, well, totally hot on the album cover. I remember being a kid and getting this album for my birthday (probably my 11th or 12th) and just sitting on my bed and staring at that picture of ONJ. It didn't hurt that the hormones were probably just starting to kick in then, but she is just fantastically gorgeous on that album cover. In fact, the entire photo shoot is very subway chic with a dose of roller disco thrown in for good measure (minus the actual roller skates.) I remember wondering whether or not those were the same pants she wore in Grease, as if the wardrobe budget was suddenly short and they had to recycle.
But enough about Olivia's tight pants, let's get to the music. This is such a strong set from Livvy, there really isn't a dud in the bunch. This is truly amazing, given what I said about her studio albums and the sheer volume of filler she is capable of. Musically, this is the first time that she took a chance and tried something different, which was a good thing as her white-bread country girl image had about run it's course by this time. The album opens with one of my all time favorite ONJ album tracks - "Please Don't Keep Me Waiting." Swirling synths and a solid vocal performance by Olivia nearly cancel out the hilarity of the final two minutes, in which Olivia screeches like a bat. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Notice that I said nearly cancel it out. I still can't listen to this song without cracking up - and that's a compliment, believe it or not.
Another strong track is the overplayed but still fantastic "A Little More Love." A plea to a lover for just a little more committment, I remember as a kid never really knowing whether or not she was singing "Will a little more love make you start depending?" or "Will a little more love make you stop depending?" Well, I guess since ONJ is trying to keep her lover, it's "start." I also really love the song "Talk To Me" which has a funky electric guitar riff in the beginning before settling down into a late 70's pop groove. It contains probably the only reference to "psychiatry" in any song I can think of in the chorus: "You don't need no psychiatry/Come on, baby, you can talk to me/Cuddle up on the couch with me/We can talk all night for free." The best part is how "psychiatry" comes out as "skyiatry."
But the best song on the entire album is the title track. I have probably listened to in hundreds of times in my life and it seriously never gets old. Another funky guitar, another great chorus, and more growled vocals by Livvy. It seriously doesn't get better than this, folks.
A lot of people count the Physicalalbum as the point at which Olivia really left her country audience behind and embraced the pop crossover. While that may be true in some respects (there's still a healthy dose of adult-contemporary/pseudo-country on Totally Hot), this album is really when Livvy broke out of the white-bread image and got down and dirty. Well, as dirty as she could at the time. Plus she didn't have the unfortunate hair cut of the Physical years or the sweatband.
She rode that wave pretty adeptly for several years. It wasn't until 1985 that she really went too far with the whole sexpot thing. The Soul Kiss album can probably be interpreted as her trying to keep up with Madonna, and it ended with People magazine exhorting her to "put her shirt back on." But with Totally Hot, it was kind of like the girl-next-door showing her wild side. And that is sexy.
Goodbye to Sandra Dee, indeed. (thanks to Lucas for providing the inspiration for this post!)
I was saddened to read that Annette Charles passed away yesterday at age 63 of complications from cancer. Annette Charles, for those of you that don't know, is perhaps best known for her portrayal of bad girl Cha Cha DiGregorio in the film adaptation of Grease.
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