"But when I said 'weatherwise,'" I say, referring to the time I said 'weatherwise' the other day, "I was making an allusion to that Frank Sinatra song. Weatherwise, it's such a lovely day... Come fly with me...."
When that album came out, in 1958, my father looked exactly like that. It's funny, when you're a kid — I was 7 — you can get the feeling that if someone looks just like someone else, that they kind of are that person. And not just in that jokey separated-at-birth way. (You never see them in the same place at the same time, ever notice?) But in some mystic way. Even when you know it's not true. It's still kind of true.
Did anyone ever come up to you and accuse you of being a celebrity and when you said that you were not, they insisted that you were? Meade had that experience. Here's Meade's 70s-era doppelganger. ("But you didn't have that hairy mole," I protest, questioning the story.)
Do you pop the bubble of fantasy or not? Would Frank Sinatra admit to being Frank Sinatra? If he were my father, he'd sign the autograph — Frank Sinatra — and get rid of the crumb.
The above-pictured album is somewhere in this pile of records that I inherited from my father, who was a terrible singer, but loved music:
I have a planned blog project related to these records, which I might roll out soon.
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