[embed]Oh Doo Doo, I’m hearing the Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo again. Can the sphincter puckers be far behind. Thanks, Brandy.

Brandy Isn’t A Fine Girl. She’s Just Clueless

And she haunts my nightmares

Brandy never was the same after the sailor rejected her….again and again and again. Photo by Mar Bustos on Unsplash

“There’s a port on a western bay And it serves a hundred ships a day Lonely sailors pass the time away…”

— From “Brandy” by Looking Glass

I still remember it like it was yesterday. And every time I hear the opening bars of the song, I still want to run screaming from the room. Or car. Or elevator. Or whereever in the hell it is that I am at that moment.

It was 1987. I was fresh out of college and working my first journalism job at a newspaper in Independence, Missouri. I was driving a green Buick Le Sabre from, I dunno, maybe the late 1970s and all it had was a tinny, AM radio. Even in those days, AM was where music went to die. As I cruised around town, I could either listen to the all news station, the all sports station, a variety of stations all carrying the same Rush Limbaugh broadcast at different times throughout the day. Or Kansas City’s oldies station. So you can guess which one won.

But only barely.

If I hadn’t been the county government reporter, it might not have been that big a deal, but because I had to cover Jackson County Legislature meetings, I spent a lot of time in my car driving back and forth to Kansas City.

A lot of time.

And much of that time was spent listening to the oldies station. This didn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. By the late 1980s, there were lots of great oldies. The Beatles. Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and The Papas. Roy Orbison. The Beatles. Otis Redding. Motown. Elton John. Elvis Presley. Did I mention The Beatles?

I don’t know if this was the exact oldies station I listened to, but what does it matter? They’re all the same. Only this was one was worse.

To listen to the station, though, you would assume that most of those acts either never existed or were mere footnotes in music history. The station definitely had its favorites and it played them ad nauseam. “Alley Oop,” “Another Saturday Night,” “Wild World,” “Hang On, Sloopy.” You know. The worst of the worst. Songs that were fun to listen to the first five or six times you heard them BACK IN THE 70s, but wore out their welcome during the Clinton Administration. Apparently, though, no one had ever bothered to send this station the memo.

“Theres a girl in this harbor town And she works laying whiskey down They say Brandy fetch another round She serves them whisky and wine….”

There was one song that was on such high rotation on the station’s playlist that it seemed to be on every time I tuned in no matter how many times I turned on the radio in a single day. Yep, you guessed it. I had to hear about what a fine girl Brandy was, what a good wife she would be, but this sailor’s life, his lover, his lady was the sea.

“At night when the bars close down Brandy walks through a silent town And loves a man who’s not around….”

Day in, day out, I had to listen to Brandy get rejected more often than pimply-faced, brace-wearing teenaged me got shut down by every girl at every high school dance I ever went to. You’d have thought she would have caught on by now, but no. The same guy rejected her again and again with the same lame ass excuse. As former President Joe Biden would say, “C’mon. Quit the malarkey, will ya?” Just once you’d think she’d shove a grapefruit in his face or something, but she just stood and took it.

“She still can hear him say She hears him say Brandy you’re a fine girl (you’re a fine girl) What a good wife you would be (such a fine girl) But my life my love and my lady is the sea….”

Although I worked at that newspaper for 15 months, I had had enough of Brandy by week two. Despite that, I had to put up with her weak-ass ways or listen to Rush (and I’m not talking about “Tom Sawyer” if you catch my drift). So, I usually chose the lesser of two evils.

Or at least, so I thought.

These days, however, Rush is dead, but Brandy lives on. And every time I hear the opening bars of that song, my facial tic returns, my sphincter puckers, the nervous laughter begins and I do my best to resist following in the footsteps of Cher in “Moonstruck” and go into that sailor’s bar, walk up to Brandy, give her a shove and yell, “Snap out of it.”

Hey, it worked for Nicholas Cage. Why shouldn’t it work for Brandy, too?