Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,6

babysitting services for Frank Jr. and Nancy. Any time my parents travel, my mother sees celebrities. It’s uncanny. They will come back from a trip and she’ll pull a list of names and quick first impressions out of her purse. “Marion Ross: nice as can be. Gavin MacLeod: seems impressed with himself. Sandy Duncan: no bigger than a minute.” Sometime in the ’90s when my folks visited me in New York, Mom came back from a shopping trip a little out of breath but exhilarated. “I saw Hugh Grant at FAO Schwarz and I followed him all the way down Fifth Avenue,” she told me. “And your thoughts?” “I’m not sure I trust him,” she confided. “It seemed like he was trying to hide from someone.” That it will absolutely never occur to my mother that Hugh Grant might have been trying to give her the slip is part of her charm. (It’s also possible that she’s just a shrewd judge of character; the Divine Brown thing happened only weeks later.)*1

Loving entertainment was the only thing I could do as well as everyone else in the house. When I was little and my brothers were still home, the car radio was always on the Top 40 AM radio station, and everybody sang along. If I couldn’t throw a ball the way my brothers could, if I couldn’t keep up with my parents’ conversation, when the radio was on we were all on the same page in the same songbook. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over. Jet, I thought that the major was a lady. I didn’t understand a word I was singing and it didn’t matter; I was doing the same thing my family was doing, and it felt good. (Years later, I told Kurt Loder about this, about how the music of Paul McCartney and Wings was the first thing that made me feel connected to the world, and his immediate reply was: “Did it bother you that Paul McCartney and Wings were awful?” Kurt Loder is Kurt Loder all day long.)

Like pretty much everyone in my generation whose home had electricity, I also spent hours sitting directly in front of the television. For the youth of the era, turn-of-the-decade Saturday nights were all about the ABC lineup: The Love Boat and, for those whose parents allowed it, Fantasy Island (Mr. Roarke got a little hard-PG with those fantasies sometimes). On Tuesdays, it was Charlie’s Angels, which I would watch with my mother. At the beginning of each episode, when the Angels gathered to talk to the squawk box on the desk, my mother would say the same thing, in the same way: “That’s John Forsythe,” she’d tell me, and then, in a whisper: “He’s quite handsome.” My immediate impression was that he was simply too handsome to be on camera; that if he were to show his face, the female viewers of Charlie’s Angels would pass out with hearts in their eyes like lovestruck young kittens in a Heckle & Jeckle cartoon and miss the show so many people had worked so hard to make. (I would go on to remain fully conscious when John Forsythe starred as Blake Carrington in Dynasty. He was all right. Settle down, Mom.)

I also developed a taste for daytime television. One Christmas break, I caught my mother watching All My Children as she ironed Dad’s shirts. It was her secret habit, and I sensed her shame at having become the kind of woman who watched soap operas. I mildly gave her the business at first—“Really, Mom? Love in the afternoon?” But by day two I was starting to recognize faces and names, and then I was starting to actively wonder why Erica and Brooke didn’t get along, or why Greg’s mom didn’t like Jenny, and Mom furnished the backstories. By the end of Christmas break I was teaching her how to program the VCR so that I could watch it after school. She quit cold turkey shortly thereafter; I stuck with it right up to the bitter end.*2

But I was drawn mostly to music, and my brothers’ peak record-buying years happened to produce the kind of music a younger brother would most want to borrow. Dan was into what at the time was called AOR—Kansas and Foghat and that “Iron Man” song by Black Sabbath that sent me screaming to my room to hide in the closet, because it was legitimately scary to a child,