Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
- Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and The Carpenter

You can't keep me away from the Arboretum, now that spring has sprung. There is something new happening every day, and I am like a child at Christmas. I must go and see.

During the winter months, the water features of the Arboretum, except for the lily pond, are drained. They recently repaired the fountains so that they are back in business, and there is water running through Childhood's Gate (the children's garden) once again.

We'd had rain for a few days, and the light was just breaking. The water was quite high and sluggish. I was making use of the surface for reflections, when I remembered seeing a bunch of little boats near the cave, and so I went over and got one and added it to my shot. In my world of whimsy, the tiny boat is about to set sail on a grand adventure to parts unknown.

My only wish was that I'd thought to bring along a Dancing Girl or two, as the boats would be the perfect size for them. (Insert sound of my photographic brain plotting and scheming at this juncture.)

It would not, of course, be the first time that I could be found playing children's games at Childhood's Gate. There is a little glass house nearby that has neat and colorful implements strewn about inside. It is a fun place to play, and I highly recommend it for children of ages from about 2 to 100.

The song to accompany this image was playing on the cassette that I was listening to in the car: the Hooters, with a tune from their 1985 Nervous Night album called Where Do the Children Go. (For this is where we go, friends; we children of all ages.) In this version, the song is performed live at The Spectrum in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving of 1987, and features Patti Smyth.

A quick word on the Hooters . . . as the band was formed in Philadelphia, they are fellow Pennsylvanians. They hit their stride in the mid-1980s with a group of hits that rocked the MTV airwaves. The band got their name from a nickname for the melodica, a special (and distinctive sounding) type of keyboard harmonica they like to use.

And then they helped a relatively unknown singer named Cyndi Lauper out on her first album, She's So Unusual. (The marvelous song Time After Time was a collaborative writing effort between Lauper and Rob Hyman of the Hooters.) And the rest, as they say, is history.

I saw the Hooters perform live at the Sy Barash Regatta, at Bald Eagle State Park, in April of 1989. In 1986, I had started dating the man I would marry many, many years later; and he and I went to the concert together.

The Collegian (the PSU student newspaper), in writing of the event, called us a "large, but apathetic" crowd. What I remember most about that event were two things: how excited I was to finally hear the band I'd seen on MTV play live (and yes, when they sang And We Danced, I DID!); and also the stifling and Gestapo-like police presence that made attending the event quite a bit more constricting than we had all expected.

P.S. If you like the Hooters at all, I highly recommend both of these CDs: Nervous Night, where it all began; and Hooterization: a Retrospective.