Let this be a Warning

Oh mighty Ozymandias!

This isn’t about statues.

Though come to think of it, “statues” is also a game; a very old game.

This happened while I was playing Cranium, a different very old game, with a friend my age, my daughter, and her boyfriend.

(Some of you—those raised on Chess, Cards, Parcheesi, Go, Monopoly, Statues, and/or Sorry—will say that Cranium isn’t old. To you I say that when a game’s popularity predates any one of the adult players at the table, that game is old.)

(ask at your peril what it means when you say you remember the time when the old game was actually new)

(Nevermind. That isn’t what this essay is about. Happy thoughts! Happy thoughts!)

I was playing Cranium—a board game that mixes charades with a lot of other pseudo-charade-like fun. And the boyfriend (who is lovely; very pleased with the boyfriend) drew a card to impersonate a celebrity without speaking any proper names or place names.

Pop culture is hard stuff when the game is old!

He looked at the card and shook his head, baffled. He stood and laid the card facedown. He gritted his teeth. He nodded.

“The hint is person but I actually don’t know anything about this person.”

“Nothing??” The room choruses. “Have you not heard of the person?”

“No. I’ve heard of them. I just don’t know anything about them.”

“Nothing?”

“Yeah. Okay. One thing.“ He holds an imaginary microphone to his lips and tunelessly sings: “Singer-singer-singer, singing a song. Singer.”

“A singer! Male or female?”

“Singer -singer singing” his voice rises to higher pitches.

“Great! It’s a woman! What else do you know about her?”

He bends over like he is walking with a cane and his back hurts.

“Okay,” his parter cheers. “Good one! She’s old!”

My friend and I make eye contact—good guess this singer is our age.

“An old woman?” my daughter muses aloud. “Lady Gaga?”

He shakes his head, says “singer-singer” into his fake microphone. (My friend and I are already dead.)

His girlfriend is shouting encouragement: “What songs of hers do you know?”

“None, actually” (sheepish shrug.) “I don’t even know what she looks like.”

My daughter’s forehead rumples like a cozy blanket on a Saturday morning.

“Madonna?”

“Yes! Right!”

My friend and I explode.

“Madonna?? You don’t know what she looks like?”

“Nope.”

My friend and I break into “Like a Virgin” simultaneously as though we’d planned it, and he shrugs. No recognition.

Papa don’t Preach? Nothing.

And then something crazy happens. And this is why I’m writing this post. The two people in the room who grew up watching Madonna change everything, who were shocked by Madonna wearing a torpedo-tits bra and the crucifixes she wore as costume jewelry (and impressed she had the courage to do it). We could not come up with a single other song.

Not one.

The listing in our brains for MADONNA came up empty. We had to look up a Madonna playlist on our phones to even remember she’d sung Vogue, even though each of us had danced the dance and knew the lyrics. It was completely insane. Madonna was the heartbeat of the music industry—but it was as if she’d never sung a note.

And here’s what I put forth to you, my fellow creators. If even a superstar like Madonna’s oeuvre (not to mention Madonna herself) can be erased in her lifetime even from the minds of people who had admired her … why are we killing ourselves over not being known? Why aren’t we just making our art and letting the other puppies chase their own tails?

I’m redoing my author website, so that’s a big deal. Finding all the links to all the old podcasts I’ve done, the old readings and early publications. Organizing stuff.

Things you can do with a broken foot.

But also I just hosted a Pen Parentis fundraiser! (Like all my fundraisers it raised almost no funds, but did bring the community together and brightened up a lot of peoples’ moods. Including mine! Turns out reading from this new novel is REALLY fun.)

But as for other moments of culture, I really didn’t do a thing. I saw the new Anthony Bordaine biopic “Tony” and agree it is more a movie of a boy becoming a man than a man becoming a chef. Otherwise, I just worked. It’s a lot of work assembling a joint public event in NYC with a person you first met three weeks ago!

My daughter goes back to college on Monday, and I can’t figure out how something that you’ve worked on for 20 years can feel so very very very painful when it succeeds.