|
|
|
 |
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Thursday, July 27, 2006
SHOP AROUND
The Miracles
Tamla : 1960
Available on : The Ultimate Collection
Motown : 1998
[Buy It]
It must have been the late summer of 1962, or the next summer, because it was in the late summer of 1962, when we ended up in the same fifth-grade class at P.S. 24, that I met my best friend, Phil; and I clearly recall that Phil and I were together on this particular day.
We spent a lot of time hanging out in Times Square, where we got up to all sorts of no good. We gravitated often to Hubert's Museum, an arcade on Forty-second Street that had a freak show in the basement. This long-gone joint is still very much a going concern in my mind. It was the inspiration for a poem I wrote called "A Feast for the Eyes."
But this wasn't at Hubert's Museum. It was at another freak show, part of a carnival, or fair, or whatever they called it, that came every summer to the parking-lot of Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. It was pretty much the dregs. On the particular day that I'm remembering, there was a big canvas poster for Olga the Swamp Gal. It showed a hot, wild-eyed broad in a scanty loincloth, standing tall with legs wide apart, her raised and extended hands bringing a giant rattlesnake to the jagged teeth of her ravenous yap. Over a broken-down P.A. system, with much crackling interference, howled the voice of a broken-down barker: "Come see Olga the Swamp Gal. She's KUH-RAY-ZEE!"
She turned out to be about eighty pounds of bony down-and-out ugly squatting in a little chicken-wire pen in cut-offs and a halter top, seemingly unaware of the two small, sorry garter-snakes that languished near to her. Nearer were a pack of Marlboros and a beat-up transistor radio. She just sat there vacantly smoking, and over that radio came "Shop Around." The record was a few years old by then, but this was the first time I heard it. What a great record, and what a great way to discover it, arriving directly from puberty to Olga the Swamp Gal.
Though I never forgot about Olga, I forgot about "Shop Around." I began hearing it in my head again four summers ago. I got hold of The Ultimate Collection, the Smokey Robinson and the Miracles CD that blasts it forth fine and true. I've been playing it ever since, over and over. Every time it plays, I hear that voice crackling through that P.A. system: "Olga the Swamp Gal. She's KUH-RAY-ZEE!"
Now here I am, at what you might call the polar opposite of puberty, still shopping around. Sometimes I think about the girls that I've known. Most of them have been crazy, but Olga was first.
-- Posted by Nick Tosches
posted by Alex
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
