hard egg

i grew up with the cbc. cbc radio, cbc television. good wholesome canadian broadcasting, with no ads, a lot of weather, and a dearth of popular music. moreover, my parents - who maybe should have been hippies, but as new immigrants born just shy of boomerdom, never made it past the cultural sidelines of the age of aquarius - tuned our house to opera, to classical, and if vocals came into the picture, to the musical stylings of pat boone, james last, patti page, and a smattering of broadway musicals (oklahoooooo-MA! where the wind comes sweeping down the plains...)

and i really never noticed that i was out of step with what all the kids were listening to. i went to a small montessori-inspired school - a one-room joint where the health of our hatching ducklings and the state of our stamp collections were vastly more important than what was where on the billboard charts - so my peer group was just as clueless - if not moreso - than i was. the only exposure i think i had to pop music was what was playing in the skating rink or the swimming pool during our weekly school outings. indeed, i have a fairly vivid memory of grooving out to some song about hard eggs at the skating rink when i was about six or seven, and it being one of the first songs i remember liking from beyond the confines of my parents' musical worlds.

when i went to public school in grade four, i became sort of painfully aware of how much there was to learn in the encyclopedia of cool. which bands to like, which actors were the dreamiest, what tv shows you needed to watch, which girls were the cutest, which guys were the cutest, which of the cutest guys liked which of the cutest girls. and man, did i study hard to learn it all, having come from a world that was, in my 10-year-old mind, the antithesis of everything cool. i learned all the codes, and then learned which ones to reject to appear even cooler (because in the lexicon of cool, it's only cool to reject the cool codes if you *know* that you're rejecting them). i practiced being blasé about the most exciting things, and because i was never pretty enough to be cool on the virtue of looks alone, i learned how to keep a secret (even, or maybe especially, the cool kids need someone to trust with their deepest and darkest). more disastrously, i learned to reject things - activities, interests, sometimes even people - based on some imaginary cool quotient.

now, of course, i look back and cringe at how hard i worked for that label. i mostly try to shrug it off like some hallowe'en costume, claim that it wasn't me, laugh about the stupid things i did in its guise. the trouble is, though, that in holding the pose of cool, the body learns some things, and learns them deep. like fear. like loathing. like how risky it is to just love doing something and showing it. like how wrong it might be to just be you.


bonnie tyler - it's a heartache