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Here's the Wikipedia page for Reparata and the Delrons. "Whenever a Teenager Cries" came out in 1965, and I don't know why it's not familiar to me, since I listened to everything on the radio in the actual year 1965 and have spent many hours listening to the 60s satellite radio channel in the last 20 years.
I stumbled into that song as I was researching the great song from 1960, "Angel Baby," originally by Rosie and the Originals. Looking that up on Spotify, I saw there was a version by Reparata and the Delrons. With a name like that, I thought they were some sort of tribute to or spoof of girl groups, maybe from the 1970s. But no, they were a real 60s group:
That's Mary "Reparata" Aiese on the right.
They asked Mary Aiese to choose a stage name to make the group name more interesting and marketable. She chose Reparata, her confirmation name, which she had taken from one of her favorite teachers at Good Shepherd Catholic grammar school.Reparata sounded vaguely punk to me, but in fact, it is a saint's name:
Saint Reparata... was a Catholic virgin and martyr of the 3rd century AD, of Caesarea, Roman Province of Palestine.... She was arrested for her faith and tortured during the persecution of Roman Emperor Decius.
Her persecutors tried to burn her alive, but she was saved by a shower of rain. She was then compelled to drink boiling pitch. When she again refused to apostatize, she was decapitated....
Her cult became widespread in Europe during the Middle Ages.... Florence celebrates her feast annually on 8 October, in commemoration of its deliverance from the Ostrogoths led by Radagaisus in AD 406, which it attributes to her intercession.
Meanwhile, in America, I see that students are censoring themselves: "SURVEY: 80% of students are 'self-censoring their viewpoints', many feel uncomfortable speaking up in class" (Campus Reform). No boiling-pitch drinks involved, just self-imposed timidity, blandness, and etiquette.
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No boiling-pitch drinks involved, just self-imposed timidity, blandness, and etiquette.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, the fear of being cancelled and having your life ruined by the activist Left?
Never heard of them. Ever.
Today's college students have grown up in semi-nurturing institutions, day care since soon after they were born, then K-12, and now college. A magic word from my time as a high school teacher was "appropriate". This conduct was "appropriate". That language was "not appropriate". It was kind of amazing the power of simply saying "Not appropriate." The student often responded with a "Sorry."
The people who run these institutions are some sort of combination of authority and caregiver. Students are used to sussing out what those people think is appropriate and not appropriate and acting accordingly.
The song reached only as high as #60 on the Billboard Hot 100- you might well have never heard the song on the radio. Also, Sirius will likely never play such a song that never got to the top 40.
I read the headline and expected a story about someone whose parents literally named her "Reparations" for the virtue signal.
What's wrong with that girl's neck?
The lyrics are fantastic:
Rain falling from the sky
Bluebirds
They don't fly
The stars, they're not so bright
The moon caved in at night
It seems the whole world dies
Whenever a teenager cries
"The moon caved in at night" — that's my favorite line.
"What's wrong with that girl's neck?"
This photo teaches a harsh lesson in how to pose women when they are different heights.
Put the short one in the middle and have the other 2 do what they can to get their faces at approximately the same level.
"Or perhaps, just perhaps, the fear of being cancelled and having your life ruined by the activist Left?"
Oh, yes. Little known fact: St. Reparata would have renounced Jesus if Lefties had been threatening to cancel her.
"SURVEY: 80% of students are 'self-censoring their viewpoints', many feel uncomfortable speaking up in class" (Campus Reform). No boiling-pitch drinks involved, just self-imposed timidity, blandness, and etiquette.
Unless, of course, they are in the anonymity of a crowd of tens of thousands at a Big Ten football game, in which case they are free to express their genuine feelings towards Joe Biden.
Oh, yes. Little known fact: St. Reparata would have renounced Jesus if Lefties had been threatening to cancel her.
Are you saying that all the Blacks from the 60's who sat at the right counter, who drank from the designated fountain, and who went to the back of the bus engaged in "just self-imposed timidity, blandness, and etiquette"?
Saints and heroes are given that recognition because they were special. Not everyone is special. There are a few who are willing to suffer the slings and arrows, but not everyone. That does not mean that they should be looked down upon.
"Also, Sirius will likely never play such a song that never got to the top 40."
I would bet that Underground Garage has played that song at least once. They seem to dig stuff out from this period, especially all-girl singing groups all the time that never really charted even in the Top 100, especially if they have a tie to the Rolling Stones (and they do, although very thin!)
Their song in the video is a very fine specimen of that glorious period!
Now that is a fantastic lyric. "The whole world dies whenever a teenager cries".
Put that together with Bob Seger's lament from "Night Moves". "Don't seem to have as much to lose--when Autumn's coming on".
The failure of a teenager's first love really is the end of the world--for the teenager. Get to the age of 40 and the now former teenager wonders what's the big deal if a relationship fails.
Get to your late 70s--where I am now--and those world ending teenage disasters seem very much like small potatoes. You remember them with a smile and a nod, and an internal acknowledgement that you were once that dumb.
I can't recall ever hearing the song before, but I certainly heard many like it. It has a pleasant, familiar sound. Someone from the old neighborhood that you never quite met before....I'm not taken with the lyrics. The song would properly fit in with the genre of teen age death music as in "Tell Laura I Love Her". This should have been Laura and the Pallbearers lamenting about how sad they were that their boyfriend had died that day. This would have made the song more maudlin. When you're doing teen age death music, you can't be too maudlin. I do appreciate the flagrant narcissism, but the song is insufficiently maudlin.
Ann Althouse said...
"Or perhaps, just perhaps, the fear of being cancelled and having your life ruined by the activist Left?"
Oh, yes. Little known fact: St. Reparata would have renounced Jesus if Lefties had been threatening to cancel her.
----
Q to Professora: is that a comeback or sarc/snark?
are you saying actual persecution = threat to cancel?
ReadDude,
That is probably true, but it wouldn't be true on the decades channels 50s-90s, which is what I meant to say. I listen to the 80s all the time, and I can't remember them ever playing a single song that wasn't a top 40 hit- the same for the 70s and 90s, though I listen to those less.
Stutefish,
Me, too.
Curious as to why the search for "Angel Baby" as I also loved the song, released just after I graduated high school. A similar song, also enjoyed by my cadre, was "A Thousand Stars" by Linda Scott. Of course our must listen to song was "Stay", 98 seconds long from Maurice Williams and the Zodiac. Several decades later Jackson Brown appended "Stay" to his song "The Load Out".
How refreshing that she would think of her confirmation name for her professional pseudonym! I'm not surprised that she wrote interesting lyrics.
“ Curious as to why the search for "Angel Baby" as I also loved the song,”
I’ve been listening to a podcast about the history of rock and the episode about The Crystals got me thinking about the distinctive voices that came to mind.
Voices in girl groups, I mean
Angst and heartbreak missing in Rap and Hip Hop - sans emotion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_eFPT63gsg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9vG5BhOKaY
Biggies from my era. Best female voices film... https://twentyfeetfromstardom.com
20 steps never gets old for me.
Angst and heartbreak missing in Rap and Hip Hop - sans emotion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_eFPT63gsg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9vG5BhOKaY
Biggies from my era. Best female voices film... https://twentyfeetfromstardom.com
20 steps never gets old for me.
This post gave me the best LOL chuckles of this particularly tedious day. Like others here I had never heard of Reparata and the Delrons, but then I have paid scant attention to popular American culture my entire life. When first confronted with that title my internal monologue ran approximately WTF is a reparata? WTF are delrons? Subatomic particles with fractional spin and imaginary mass? Upon learning that Reparata was the name of a RC saint I could only think of Eric Idle in Nuns on the Run. "I'm Sister Euphemia of the Five Wounds, Five Wounds for short."
Still don't know what a delron is, however.
As for that publicity still, the absurd Quasimodo stance of the girl on the left pales in comparison to those absolutely pug-ugly gowns or whatever sort of modified root vegetable sacks they're wearing. I suppose the late unlamented Hugh Hefner approved of bare midriff outfits, but then he made a fortune pushing girly magazines to freshly pubescent sex maniacs like me.
As for the original Reparata, she and nearly all the other pre-Constantinian saints belong more in a collection of nasty stories for naughty children than in the annals of a self-respecting religion. Apart from anti-imperial diatribes like those of Tacitus, who never greeted a lurid story about the Claudians with an iota of healthy skepticism, there's little evidence of such ludicrous executions of Christians. They were abused and persecuted, yes. Fined and exiled, yes. But forced to drink boiling pitch and then asked to recant their faith? You'd have to be really stupid or extremely Catholic (which may be the same thing) to accept such nonsense. Firstly, a living Christian slave working in the lead mines was a much more desirable to the average Roman than a dead one killed by insane tortures, or anyone with half a brain who was disposed to hate those Christus worshipers. In the mines they were far away from influencing any good citizens in the local forum who might listen to their rants, and the life expectancy of a lead miner in classical times was less than a year, therefore Roman society gets a benefit and is rid of a disruptive element in one stroke. Secondly, pitch derived from plant resins boils at about 530 degrees Centigrade. Assuming a person could survive drinking boiling pitch even for a span of seconds, the all the speech-producing organs would be burned to the fourth degree almost instantly. The victim would be hard pressed to even exhale, let alone utter so much as a gurgle.
Never heard the song before. Surprised it's from 1965, it sounds very '50s to me.
Delron "Hispanic for "The Super Sex" The term Delron usually refers to one who is incredibly masculine compared to the same sex. Also refers to those who write great music"
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=delron
>>Never heard of them. Ever.
Ditto. Very weird. I'm just shy of three years younger than Althouse. On the South Side of Chicago back in the day, we used to, inter alia, hang out on the street corner at night listening to "Wonderful WLS/It's the greatest" on our transistor radios (we *weren't* gunning anybody down or being gunned down, which seems to be the fashion in the neighborhood these days). But this song is one I can't recall ever hearing.
--gpm
I recommend The Shaggs. I still don’t know if they’re real.
I also recommend Saint Columban.
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