In about a week, the schools in our area will close for the summer. Where you live, kids might already been out. Here, it’s always the latter half of June.
I no longer have a kid in school, so I don’t keep track any longer; yet, the fact that the last day of school is just around the corner is acutely evident, for two reasons. One, the ice cream truck is coming around in the afternoon. Two, Alice Cooper is on the radio. A lot.
It was the summer of 1972; I was in my final days of elementary school, when “School’s Out” hit the charts.
Don’t pretend you don’t know it. I bet you can tell me exactly where you were on your life’s road or where the song takes you when you hear it today.
For me it was Annandale, Virginia. I felt so grown up, saying good-bye to the school with the little chairs, and facing junior high with excitement and anxiety. Mostly, “School’s Out” meant spending seven days a week at the Wakefield Chapel pool and having sleepovers where we listened to music and called our requests in to WPGC radio.
By 1972, I had outgrown David Cassidy; Alice Cooper was a real rocker. He sang rebelliously about the fantasied obliteration of school (not such a realistically dangerous notion back then) and we could relate to it. I understand that, in 2004, Rolling Stone named “School’s Out” one of the 500 greatest songs of all time. I never owned an Alice Cooper record, but if I had it to do over, I would have snapped one up at Rainbow Tree.
I confess, when that song comes on the radio, I still crank it up and sing along. Belted it out it just yesterday, as I pulled out of the grocery store parking lot, after stopping for Activia.
To this day, while far from poetic, my favorite verse is:
Well we got no class
And we got no principles [play on words, perhaps?]
And we got no innocence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes
Please don’t think less of me.
So, where were you when you first grooved to this song? And hearing it on American Idol doesn’t count.
I just heard that tomorrow 
Six years after that, a girl moved into our Virginia neighborhood from California. We were hanging out in her basement one day and she told me she had Davy Jones’ ring. She said she had been in the front row at a concert and, as Davy bounced energetically about the stage, the ring slipped off his finger and she caught it. She said she tried several times to return it but never got a response.
So which modern TV mother are you? Or maybe you’re more of a traditional TV mother like June Cleaver or Edith Bunker. Or a mod 1960s or ‘70s mother like Samantha Stevens or Shirley Partridge. Which one do you wish you were and why?
Hon?
I tried to come up with a unique angle from which to write about it, but it’s all been done. The weird and tacky commemorative souvenirs. The event as perceived by the male species. How British police have deployed a special team of security forces for the “mentally unhinged and the royal-obsessed.” The repeated use of the word “commoner” to describe the bride. Even how much fun the name of her home town is to say: Bucklebury.
I’m a little ashamed of our household’s size 16 carbon footprint. We are the antithesis of the Johnsons. I’m not sure exactly how two humans and two felines can generate enough weekly waste to fill the Johnsons’ bins for more than a year. See for yourself. Not counting the bags of yard waste that already await pick-up at the curb, we’ve filled a 20-gallon can and an even larger sized Hefty bag in less than a week. Plus this large recycling bin and a paper bag’s worth of newspapers joining the yard waste at the curb as we speak.
In a 
I was beyond psyched. After all, the nation’s great comedic pioneers and geniuses were behind the creation of this new event: Stephen Colbert, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Seth MacFarlane, Conan O’Brien, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Chris Rock, Ray Romano, Phil Rosenthal, George Schlatter, Jon Stewart and Lily Tomlin, among others.
Word Nymph 