OVERHEARD: LOVER MAN

The time: 9:35 on an early December morning
The place: The BX40 bus going eastbound on Tremont Avenue
The player: A heavy-set, middle-aged African-American man with a cane

[His cellphone rings. The ringtone is the "voulez-vous couchez avec moi" refrain from "Lady Marmalade"]
Man with cane, brightly: "Hey, baby!"

Comments

[John Albin]

I can't help it, but every time I hear Lady Marmalade mentioned, I have to tell this story:

I went to a Quaker school in Manhattan attended almost exclusively by Jewish kids in the mid 70s. Among my schoolmates were the children of Rick Sklar, the guy who ran WABC radio and basically invented top 40 radio. Every year, the school held a big festival/fundraiser, the high point of which was a concert in the Quaker meeting house adjacent to the school featuring acts brought in by Sklar. One year (must have been late 74 or early 75), the acts were Tavares and LaBelle, right around the time Lady Marmalade broke in NY, and before any of us had seen them on TV or really knew who they were. So there all of us 12-year-olds were perched on pews in the meeting house (where we sat in silence every morning) recovering from the leisure-suited splendor of "It Only Takes A Minute Girl" when this bodacious ta-tad'ed, skin-tight-space-suited trio of wtf is that? burst out. Having flourished under the tutelage of our French teacher Mademoiselle (I kid you not) Gonzalez, when the chorus came around we were struck dumb. I think it was at that exact moment I first sprouted facial hair.

Sorry about that. As you were.

[Tom Siler]

i think I'll download that ringtone right now. . .