45s and Summer

by editor Michele Catalano

Summer never held any kind of heavy promise for me as a kid, because I never expected anything out of it. It just had to be. As long as I could get up in the morning and walk outside barefoot, it was all good. I never wore shoes. Even in the late afternoon, when the street had been scorched by the sun all day and your skin could blister on contact, I would hop from car shadow to tree shadow or run on tiptoe, letting out little yelps of pain all across the street. Shoes were a formality. Summer was casual. And the music reflected that. Winter, with its long darkness, was for albums. Summer was for 45s. 

My baby sister’s room had air conditioning. At that time, mine did not. My baby sister’s room had a (Fisher-Price) record player. At that time, mine did not. But I had 45s, and whenever my mom was in the pool with my sisters, I would run into Lisa’s room and start playing records. I’d run the air conditioner full blast, close the door, and dance around in my bathing suit to the likes of “Brand New Key.” My hairbrush microphone skills were unmatched. 

Summer was the church fair with its zeppoles and goldfish games and Ferris wheels. The balloon/dart game, where I won the Lynyrd Skynyrd mirror that’s still in my mother’s attic. The tilt-a-whirl thing, where I met Doug while sitting underneath the machinery, smoking a Marlboro and listening to the Doobie Brothers “Black Water” blast through the neighborhood. And then walking home from the fair each night, clutching whatever stuffed animal I won, smelling like fried food and beer. From my house I could still hear Father M. on the microphone, exhorting the crowd to buy into the 50/50. Before I went to bed, I’d play “Black Water” and think about kissing Doug underneath the Ferris Wheel.

Summer was getting sunburned at the beach, before we knew how bad the sun could be for you. We slathered ourselves in baby oil and cocoa butter and made sun reflectors out of tin foil. My friends’ faces and arms tanned a beautiful bronze while my arms withered, blistered, burned, and peeled. I gave up on the sun after a while and spent my beach time under an umbrella, reading Judy Blume’s Wifey and listening to 99X on the little portable radio. All the girls gathered around the radio when Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” inevitably came on. We’d swoon and sigh and imagine we were the ones he was singing to. At night, I’d slather my sunburn in Noxema, put on my Andy Gibb 45 and dance around my room, my hairbrush microphone technique still intact. 

During the summer we would sometimes travel upstate to Roscoe, NY, for days or weeks at a time. We’d wear sneakers into the lake because the bottom was a bed of mud and algae. We’d catch frogs and snakes and salamanders and then let them go because my parents didn’t want to drag the things home with us. We’d carve our initials on trees and make forts that served as a refuge, a place to go to get some shade and read Mad magazine and Archie comics. 

The room I slept in had a record player but only one 45: a strange, foreboding song that spoke of the future with great concern and distress. Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525” spooked me as much as it intrigued me. I must have listened to several dozen times during our stay that summer. When I got home, I went straight to the library to look for books about the future. A love of sci-fi was born that summer, thanks to a one-hit wonder.

Later, summers meant hanging out at the school yard night after night, the suffocating heat making us cranky, causing a lot of fights and dramatic breakups. When Tony broke up with Gloria, we had to go back to my house so she could sob, for what felt like several hours, to the Manhattans’ “Kiss and Say Goodbye.” It was Gloria’s turn with the hairbrush, and we all just sat by solemnly as she sang her heart out through tears. Summer was for drama.

Summer was also for rain. There’s nothing better than a wicked summer storm, when it gets nighttime dark at one in the afternoon and the trees bend in the wind. Huge thunderclaps that shake the house and lightning that cuts through the black clouds like jagged flashlights. Those stormy days were meant for staying in my bedroom with a stack of 45s, dancing to some disco hit my friends didn’t know I loved.

The older I get, the less I enjoy summer. The heat and the Long Island humidity are hard to handle now, and I sometimes dread the season the way I dread winter. But every time I get weary about summer, I think of all these things that made it so enjoyable when I was younger. Spinning 45s in a freezing room in my bathing suit, hairbrush microphone in hand.

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