It's a rant, just a stupid little rant, and a rant is what you make it!

I don't listen to the radio on a consistent basis in the car. Most of the time I treat my solo rides in the car as decompressing time from work with no noise. If my kids are in the car, we are usually listening to their iPods. I do usually listen on my ride to work, and I always listen while I am getting ready in the morning at home. This is not going to be a rant about the radio but rather advertising on the radio and advertising through the media in general. Right around graduation time the radio station I listen to at home while I am getting ready played one particular ad over, and Over, and OVER again! It was an ad for a car company. The copy started out with a young graduate girl saying these words excitedly ( a little too excitedly in my opinion, translation: bad acting) "When my dad mentioned the words graduation surprise..." She was irritating enough, but then the voice over switches to the Dad with the teenage girl squealing in the background. The actor they hired to voice the dad literally sounded like some creepy pervert who stands outside of a school yard drooling while he watches all the high school girls come out and go to their cars. I kid you not, one of his lines in talking about his daughter's reaction to the gift of the car was "She was out of control!" said with this really creepy, lecherous inflection. I got to the point where I would almost break my neck jumping over my bed to get to the clock radio to turn off the sound that was offending my ears. If I could not make it to the radio, I would regress to my elementary days and plug my ears with my fingers and sing "La, La, La" loudly until I was relatively sure the commercial was over. There's another radio ad that I turn off every time it comes on. It's the one where the mom is riding her daughter's school bus because gas prices are too high, and she seems to delight in embarrassing her child. Then there's the one for the well known fast food chain that talks about living with a morning person, and the annoying roommate sings "It's a new day!" Yes, I realize she is supposed to be annoying, but so annoying that the consumer no longer listens to the commercial? Probably not. And then there's television. Luckily I am almost never home, so almost all the TV I watch is on TIVO. The plus? being able to fast forward through all the commercials. Like the super annoying commercial for a well known Virginia amusement park where the family sits and screams at the kitchen table, not yelling words, but bloodcurdling, ear-piercing, shrieks. I cannot get to the remote fast enough! Or the ever popular, "It's my money, and I need it NOW!!" or the screaming pig on the zip line. Then there are the commercials that are just disturbing visually like the one for the rainbow candy where a boy has a tree growing out of the center of his chest or the same company's most recent gross offering of a girl making out with a huge walrus. Then there's the lovely commercial for termite extermination that has a huge creature that would rival anything fabricated for an alien movie from an FX studio. My point is, when any of these commercials come on, I turn them off or worse yet, I change the channel. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that just the opposite of what I'm supposed to do?

Last Dance

Music is a very important part of my life and always has been, but the time in my life that I really began to identify with music and form my opinions of what I loved and purchased probably started in my middle school and ran through my very early high school years, 1976 to 1979. A new genre of music exploded onto the scene in 1977 with the release of a film called Saturday Night Fever, Disco. You could not turn on a radio without hearing the high-pitched voices of the Bee Gees and the driving beat behind them. Disco became THE music, and I was a huge fan! My middle school days were way before the dawn of the digital age. There were no iPods, iTunes, or YouTube. Even computers were reserved for places like NASA, and they were housed in huge rooms. You certainly couldn't hold one in your hand. If you wanted to hear a particular song, you could do one of 2 things: 1. sit and wait for it to come on the radio at the ready to push PLAY and RECORD simultaneously on your snazzy cassette recorder that allowed you to tape things off the airwaves or 2. you could purchase a vinyl record of the single called a "45" to play on your very own stereo turntable. One artist, in particular, although she was not featured on the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, was my favorite singer of the disco era. Her name was Donna Summer. She had this velvet, mezzo soprano voice, and her songs were the songs that I lived for that moment riding in the car when they would come on. I'd yell, "Turn it up! Turn it up!" to whoever was driving as soon as I heard those first driving beats of She Works Hard for the Money, Bad Girls, or Hot Stuff among many others. My absolute favorite above all of her recordings, 5 winning Grammys, was Last Dance. Excitement is an understatement of how I felt every time that song came on the radio. Starting out with her dulcet tones singing the refrain in a slow tempo with an ethereal feel to it, but then taking off in that driving beat that was a Disco dancer's dream. She was the Queen of disco, and she was worthy of the crown. Even if you hated disco, I defy you to listen to a Donna Summer song and stay completely still. No, they weren't filled with thought-provoking lyrics, and, pretty much, all of them sounded the same, but they were about the beat and the voice and rousing you to your feet to do the rope hustle or the pretzel. I wore out that "45" standing alone in my room belting out Last Dance with Donna. She provided the soundtrack to my early teen years. We lost Donna Summer to cancer yesterday at the age of 63. I would say Rest in Peace, but it doesn't really seem fitting for someone who provided so many of us with the music we loved to dance to for years. So I'll just say, "Enjoy your disco welcome party, Donna. You'll never have to worry about the "last dance" again.