Letters to My Agent

My daughter Gus and I are sitting at the dining room table of a Sunday morning in our dusty, schmutzy home. Gus is making a clay model of the first flag of the United States of America and singing “yes, we have no bananas.” I am explaining that some people only write about themselves and that there is something wrong with that, no matter how interesting your life is. I’m trying to justify my opinion, but am not getting anywhere.

“Well,” she says helpfully, “if they really are interesting, it’s not so bad. But if they think they’re interesting, I could care less. Or if they’re interesting but they’re also full of themselves, I don’t really want to read about them.”

That seems fair, I think. I write it down.

“You should probably alter that,” Gus says, “and make it a bit more poetic.”

Here’s how I make it more poetic:

Watch the first person, Mary Jane/Or you’ll be, to your readers, a royal pain.

“Is `Yes We Have No Bananas’ a famous song?” she asks, busily coloring in the British flag of 1776.

“Yes.”

Apparently, the song was written in 1922 for a revue entitled “Make It Snappy.” Eddie Cantor sung it. I remember that my 18-year-old daughter Coco had an unlikely obsession with Eddie Cantor when she was ten, which is exactly how old Gus is now. She dressed up as a flapper for her fifth grade Famous Person Presentation, which was  very dramatic. The speech ended like this: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you. . .Eddie Cantor!” Then she hit the play button on the ol’ family cassette player and the rural, outdoorsy classroom of the 1990s-era was flooded with “if you knew Suzy, like I know Suzy, oh, oh, oh what a gal!” Her classmates were speechless.

The foregoing was not about me. It was about Eddie Cantor and Coco.

“Are you obsessed with any particular singer?” I ask Gus.

“I like Beck. I think it’s cool how he does all those different instruments and they all make up one song and it’s not just music. Plus, I like his voice.”

“Sing me a little snatch of Beck,” I propose.

“No!” 

“Recite me some Beck lyrics.”

“Yeah. I saw her–wait, no–her something tongue tied, her something paterrlives, this girl owns a vending machine, white noise, the bells are ringing, gonna take her for a midnight something. . .oh well, I forget the rest.”

“Yuh-huh. Now please compare and contrast those words with those of the song `Yes, We Have No Bananas.’”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I haven’t a clue.”

In fact, though, this child does know from lyrics. The other night we were working on a song called “You Gotta Wear A Noser” for an as-yet-un-named revue. The song, directed at our pitbull mutt Myrtle, deals with the fact that she has to wear a mean leash that encircles her muzzle whenever she leaves the house. This would indicate that she is a vicious dog, but she’s so submissive that the minute she hears the song’s intro, her butt begins to tremble and then she shakes all over with delight. So we were trying to improvise the lyrics less and cement them in stone more. Gus wrote this:

“So stop your lollygagging/And your gagging of the loll!”

This is a pretty good lyric, and does not use the first person.

I wonder what Eddie Cantor is up to.