I’m simultaneously laughing and singing along to THE FIRST TIME EVER I…Ammo Grrrll writes:
A very long time ago in what feels like a Galaxy far far away, I was a teenage girl madly, deeply, insanely in love with the most attractive and interesting male person I had ever met up till then. And ever since, truth to tell, though I have been blessed to meet MANY awesome people.
And my inamorata had a small record collection that included early Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, and Gordon Lightfoot. I, on the other hand, owned The Kingston Trio, Marty Robbins, Gunfighter Ballads, and The-Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart. But, this will not be a column about our divergent artistic tastes. Perhaps another time. Hang in there.
Mr. Lightfoot had a swoonable song that expressed what my fluttery little teenage heart could not: “The first time, ever I saw your face / I thought the sun rose in your eyes, ooh / And the moon and the stars / Were the gifts you gave / To the dark, and the endless skies, my love. / And the first time, ever I kissed your mouth / I felt the earth, I felt the earth move in my hand.”
It went on in that vein. It could still make my heart race right this minute were it not for the blood pressure meds I now take to keep my heart from racing.
Mr. Lightfoot did not write the song. A Commie Brit stage-named Ewan MacColl, married to Pete Seeger’s sister Peggy wrote it in 1957. As at least legend has it, Ewan and Peggy were estranged at the time but on friendly terms. She was away in a play and needed a song for a romantic scene in the play. She turned to Ewan and he wrote the song in an hour and sang it to her over the phone!
The song did not really become famous until 1972 when Roberta Flack made a yuge hit out of it by dragging out the singing of it for longer than it took Ewan to write it. Though I liked the late, great Ms. Flack just fine, I was not a fan of that version. It beat out “American Pie” for 1973 Best Song of the Year. Alas, I did not get a vote. But, I was quite entranced with the poetry of the lyric and particularly the placement of the words “The first time ever I…” And so, I shall use it as a theme for this column.
Sometimes when conservative friends gather we discuss how far our beloved country has fallen into moral and spiritual disrepair and wonder both if it can recover and how it got so far gone before anybody said, “Enough!” Here are my thoughts on how a lot of it could have been prevented. But first the stipulation that I live in a house made entirely of glass and am in no position to throw stones. To wit:
THE FIRST TIME EVER I REGAINED 3 POUNDS AFTER A SUCCESSFUL DIET, I SHOULD HAVE STOPPED RIGHT THERE AND TURNED IT AROUND!
I have mentioned in this space before that I have probably lost 500 pounds in my life — 20 pounds 25 times over some 60 years! I have done Atkins before it morphed into KETO. I have done low calorie to the point it was barely distinguishable from anorexia. I have done plant-based. I have done so-called “Intermittent Fasting” wherein you eat within a narrower and narrower window. And I succeeded – briefly – with each paradigm.
I have – under terrible advice from many a motivational speaker – “listened to my body.” But the trouble is that my body is a self-indulgent immature idiot. I should NEVER “listen” to my body because it just says things like, “how about another piece of cake? You have EARNED it. You’ve been soooo good. You know what would be great right now? Biscuits and Gravy. What could that hurt, really?” And so forth.
But the ONE thing I do know from all of these epic fails is that if you weigh every single day and call a halt the FIRST TIME you see your weight go up even three pounds, you are going to be able to stop the need for a much more extreme solution. And perhaps we CAN take some lessons from this for the larger society after all.
THE FIRST TIME EVER SOMEONE SAID HE FELT “UNSAFE” because somewhere else on campus there was a speaker with which that person disagreed, that person should have been counseled first, then expelled if agreement could not be reached.
“Look, Mindy, or Caden, or Shaneequa, nobody is forcing you to attend this speech by Ann Coulter. I think she’s kind of a snot myself, but a student group has invited her and I can assure you that you are safe as houses. And, no, you don’t need a stuffed toy or some Play-Doh to get through this. You are a voting-age adult. If you believe that somebody ELSE hearing an opinion you don’t like puts you in peril, then you are not equipped for either college or the big scary outside world. You will never ever be able to get or keep a job. May I suggest a nunnery, a hippie commune or some other cloistered setting? But for sure, not here.”
But no. The Administration in almost all the colleges folded like a cheap card table, either demanding huge liability insurance from the groups trying to bring conservatives to campus, or allowed bullhorn disruption to the point that no conservative could be heard. Ever.
“First Amendment Rights” and “Free Speech” were racist, sexist, transphobic concepts severely frowned upon as a thing until they finally all found a cause they could get behind: harassing Jewish students in the name of Free Palestine, Kill the Jews, Queers for Hamas. And mostly: Keep Those Full Tuitions Coming From Qatar and Saudi Arabia! And just like that, Free Speech was cool again! But the Road to Perdition began with the first campus that ever allowed “unsafe” to be a get-out-of-free-speech card. It made me sick to my stomach…speaking of which…
THE FIRST TIME EVER THEY SAW A MAN IN A WOMEN’S LOCKER ROOM, he should have been grabbed by his onesie tuckunder swimsuit by large burly men and shown the door. Those men should have been shepherding Rottweilers on leashes and if the interloping pervy man was accidentally bitten, he should have been told, “Rasputin here identifies as a cocker spaniel. You were never in any more danger than a woman boxer is while being hit by a man.”
What Riley Gaines and a host of women athletes have had to put up with has been a historical disgrace after all the time it took to get Title IX and even a thing called Women’s Sports.
I also believe that IF the entire Girls’ Swim Team had quit en masse, first day Free Willie Thomas showed up, the whole thing would have ended there. Yes, I know many if not all of these young athletes were on swim team scholarships. Yes, I realize that several of the young ladies had been brainwashed to the point that THEY felt like the bad guys if they objected.
Yes, I realize these young athletes had been training for this since they were preschoolers. Their parents had shlepped them to practice pools at 4:00 a.m. for years and years. In the Civil Rights Era, activists (not just MLK or Malcolm X) and not just black people, gave their very LIVES for the cause. Losing a scholarship, transferring to a different college or even quitting college is far from the end of the world.
Ultimately, of course, it should not have had to fall to the young ladies to take the brunt of it. THE most common of common senses should have prevailed. And, thank God, now perhaps the immutable truth can actually be legislated: There are three genders, but only in grammar. There are two sexes, male and female. ALL women’s sports are for females only. Heck, even Sir Charles of Barkley has, uh, weighed in and called men in women’s sports “stupid.”
Fellas, go back to the Men’s Leagues where you will give even “mediocrity” a bad name. Or have an All Pretend League where men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men can all pretend to be trophy-winning athletes. (And the XY people will STILL win…)
And now, having once again solved one of the problems of the world, I believe I will go listen to Gordon Lightfoot.
