Datebook: Monday, March 3rd ~ 2008

This is the time of year that everyone spends a few hundred dollars on CDs and music downloads trying to find the right song to take to the ice for the coming competitive year.

This is also a tentative period because often you have heard great songs the year before and wonder how long you must wait before you can “borrow” it. The answer is, of course, once it is used you can never truly borrow it because it will always be know as “Naomi and Peter’s” or “Charlie and Meryl’s”. And just like plagiarism in the literary world, one might think you could change it up just a bit, add 30 seconds from a companion song here, a different 30 seconds of the song there, and it you might be able to call it your own.

Wrong.

There will always be program police who will identify is as belonging to prior skaters in the past.

My daughter is one of them. She can hear five notes and announce some obscure (to me) skaters from 10 years ago who skated to that music at an exhibition in Prague. Additionally, she is a name linguist—as in she knows how to pronounce every name from any country with the correct accent on any and all syllables.

This is not my forte. But she is such a perfectionist about this that, just to annoy her, I will sometimes say things like “Eye-Gor” just so she can correct me as if she is a Russian IV language professor. And, I admit, it should be easy to remember these things but I can’t—maybe I cloud my brain with too many other superfluous things like the 480 different breeds of dogs in the world and the 190 different Cosmopolitan drink flavors at the Manor Inn Tavern. Whatever the reason, I concede, it shouldn’t be too hard to remember if you pronounce the “e”, or not, at the end of “Pasquale” but I tend to switch it up, often in the same sentence.

So finding music is always a long journey for those of us who can join in the hunt and are not just assigned a ballad by our coaches. What typically happens, in our camp, is that we come up with five songs. Songs the skaters like, songs the parents like, and songs the coaches like—which typically has one or two selections by Frank Sinatra (per said coaches). So your selection CD can range from Motley Crew to Bryan Adams to Michael Buble.

You then have to listen to the CD at the rink to see how it “plays on the ice”. You are in a sense calling “Dibs” on these songs as they are on your potential selection repertoire heard by all the other skaters on the ice that day.

What happens next is that the coaches make the final selection based on a number of factors that I have yet to process: “The second song is best because there are more words with the letter “A” in them so they have a stronger beat”. “The title has 46 letters in it and if you multiply that times the number of judges on the panel and then carry the 5 and finally you have the distance from Cleveland to Pittsburgh.”

The final songs are never unanimously accepted in our camp—someone is left pining over a song not skated to—hence know forever as “the runner-up song”.

To complicate things, our last two runner-up songs have been selected by a team in one of our triad of training rinks each of the past two years. A good team, a close friends team.

“Well,” I say to my daughter who is a bit conflicted by this, “you just made their job easier for them and saved them some time and money—maybe they’ll take you out for dinner or something, or give you a shout-out in the program.”

“Well, I know you can’t call dibs on a song, but it seems a bit unethical almost—I’m not sure what, but it seems a bit of something.”

I look at her and realize that she has been sheltered from many things in life, like the one day shoe sale at Nordstrom’s where it is every woman for herself, and ten years ago fighting the crowds at Toys-R-Us on Black Friday to get the last two Power Ranger Kicking Action Figures—I still walk with a limp on cold rainy days.

“Sweetheart, you’ve been driving for three years—what happens when there is only one parking space left at Trader Joe’s on a busy Saturday afternoon”

“That’s different—those are strangers, not good friends”.

“Okay,” I acknowledge, “But remember what Grandmom Freberger always said, which I admit I have semi-forgotten verbatim, but it was something about those who covet what others have or want are really just exhibiting a form of flattery.”

My daughter’s mouth twitches a bit because she wants to correct me but she senses this is a learning moment. So she merely nods and says, “I suppose.”

“And”, I continue, “There are few factors the other team hasn’t considered.”

My daughter looks at me with trepidation.

“There were reasons you didn’t settle on the other two songs—major reasons that they probably haven’t thought about in their camp.”

She nods.

“So, that makes it a bit more like what Grandma King used to say—there will be a hex in both their houses.”

“Mom, that’s from Romeo and Juliet.”

I am rendered speechless and a bit teary-eyed for a moment by her memory of 9th grade English.

“So, I paraphrased a bit. It was the same message—nothing good can follow a bad start.”

She rolls her eyes finally so I know she is over the whole thing.

“Besides”, I venture on, “You can have fun with this and start them off for next year by raving about the musicality of “Muskrat Love” or one of the songs by Hanson.

She shakes her head and goes back to reading her book which I assume is the “Pronunciation of Azerbijanian names—the 300 series”.

Mombo