December 21, 2008
Sunday

In December of 1960, I was 13 years old and in the eighth grade at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School. Under the Catholic school model of an eight-grade elementary school and a four-year high school, I was still being instructed by a single teacher in a self-contained classroom. As it happened that year, my eighth grade was split. The boys had the principal, Sister Josita Marie, and the girls were spending their second year with Sister Mary Rita, she of The Poinsettia Song and the invocations of D’Arcy McGee. No one ever told us why this arrangement had been made, but most of us believed it happened because Sister Rita had gotten too old (she was only in her sixties), too frail, or too cranky to handle the boys. I was looking forward to high school, when I could be like my friend Dennee, who attended the public junior high school, switched classes every forty-five minutes, and didn’t have anything on her schedule as juvenile as “recess.”

Like most girls my age then, I spent a lot of time on the phone with other girls. I watched American Bandstand after school and read Teen and Seventeen. Delivering Girl Scout cookies with my troopmates Alice and Linda, I decided along with them not to continue into the senior division in high school because how could you tell a boy you couldn’t go out with him because you had to go to your Girl Scout meeting, hmm?

Together with two girlfriends, Maria and Pat, I helped plan and stage a Christmas party at Maria’s house. One of the guests was Stewart, my cousin’s friend who was then attending a private boarding school. Stewart was attractive for several reasons: at 5’8″ he was taller than I was (most of the boys in my class were not); he was somewhat exotic, with dark hair and more of a beard than any boy at OLBS (and in his military school uniform, quite dashing, or as dashing as a 14-year-old-boy could be); and he liked me (because, I was convinced, he knew me mostly through my letters and was not constantly reminded visually of how dorky I was).

I received my first kiss at that party, an awkward and almost furtive encounter accomplished by either Stewart or me or maybe both of us maneuvering ourselves as we danced to a position under the mistletoe. Either Pat or Maria or maybe Maria’s Aunt Dotty, captured the moment on camera, and I kept the picture for years. Surely the music that aided this quest was something slow and romantic, maybe Percy Faith’s orchestra doing the theme from A Summer Place, or Brenda Lee (only two years older than I was) singing passionately that she wants to be wanted, she wants someone to share her laughter and her tears with, she wants his lips to really kiss her.

If I could have been anyone else at that time in my life, I would have been Brenda Lee. I had outgrown wanting to be the daughter of Ralph McCutcheon, legendary Hollywood horse trainer who owned Fury (the black stallion in The Story of a Horse and the Boy Who Loves Him). Brenda Lee was cute, talented, popular, famous. When Aunt Dotty made us take a break from dancing and embracing under the mistletoe at the party, we probably played Brenda Lee’s fabulous current hit, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

Last night a friend and I went to the Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Center in York to see Little Miss Dynamite, Brenda Lee, perform. She has been on the stage for more than fifty years. She is the only woman who is in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When she was fifteen and performing in England, her opening act was an obscure Liverpool band known as The Beatles.

Brenda Lee is 64 years old and still dynamite. Her voice has deepened and her range narrowed somewhat, and she’s a little rounder than she was back in the day (as which of us is not!), but she sang for forty-five minutes, chatted with the audience and did a little bit of a standup comedy act for another thirty, took a short break, and came back for forty minutes more.

During the talking part she was handed a note. It seems that a woman in the audience, born in April of 1960, was named Brenda Lee in the singer’s honor. Brenda Lee had her namesake stand up and be recognized. The younger Brenda Lee was accompanied by her brother, Keith.

When I began my novel, the central character emerged as “Brenda.” The more I worked on the character, establishing her voice and her personality, the more I was sure that Brenda was the perfect name for her. I created a backstory that portrayed my character’s mother as admiring the talent and the clean living of Brenda Lee, whose start, like that of many singers who emerged from the South into rock and roll, had been in gospel. So she named her baby after her. And my character’s brother? Keith.

Brenda Lee ended her concert with a rousing version of the song I had come to hear. I left the theater humming a happy tune, ready to deck the halls with boughs of holly and have a happy holiday, and then get back to work on my novel.

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A year ago, I held forth on the True Meaning of Christmas.

Two years ago, I wrote about the solstice.

Three years ago, I summarized August of 2005, the main event of which was the death of Lynn’s grandmother, my mother-in-law.

Four years ago, I aired my first Festivus grievance, about a woman who was airing an unwarranted grievance in a craft store.

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