Silly Love Songs

and the Things People Do for Love

By Joani Foster

There are probably five million silly songs about falling in love. Poets and famous writers have been trying to define it for eons. The answer is simple. Romantic love is a mental Illness. It effects the most rational of people in strange and mysterious ways. They find themselves doing things they would never ever do under normal circumstances. Silly things.

A case–in–point was the recent journey of astronaut Lisa Nowak, resulting in charges of stalking and attempted kidnapping in an unusual love triangle. Imagine the discipline required to train and qualify to propel yourself out of this world and into outer space, as well as to eat dehydrated food and exist in zero gravity? How silly was it to read that she drove cross-country for love, wearing a disguise. How humiliating is that? Whatta you bet she was listening to love songs along the way? I wonder what her silly love song was?

Mine song is Key Largo. It goes like this: “Wrapped around each other. Lying in each other’s arms. The first cold winter together. Trying so hard to stay warm. Watching those old movies. Falling in love desperately. Honey I was your hero and you were my leading lady.” The chorus went like this: “We had it all just like Bogie and Bacall…Sailing away to Key Largo.”

Word felons, known as lyricists, create songs that riddle your mind. Countless people buy them and secretly reminisce about current or past liaisons. It’s all about those times that a virus wrapped itself around our senses, stole into our lives, and caused us to do silly things in the name of love.

Love makes us feel high and silly love songs keep us there. I quizzed my local librarian about her favorite love song and she told me in quiet confidence that the tune that ran through her head when she was smitten was “Unbreak my heart” by Toni Braxton. When I posed the same question to the cable lady, she admitted to “My heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion.

I freely admit to being a fool for love. I will fess up here that, as a teenager, I dressed up on Halloween as a ghost for love. Two holes in a pillowcase and another sheet over my body was my clever disguise. Bribing my two little brothers, my brilliant plot was to be able to catch a glimpse of the girl my current love was reputed to be seeing. (Women have an insatiable need to check out the competition) We headed off to go on a trick or treat mission in a nearby suburb where she lived.

It escaped my attention that we were the only revelers on the street. Just as we reached the door and I rang the bell, my pillowcase slipped and the eyes holes moved to my forehead. I couldn’t see. I tried desperately to set it right while the boys held out their bags. I heard a voice say, “Didn’t you know we welcomed trick and treaters LAST night in this town?” I mumbled something incoherently. Little Ray and Bob were pulling me down the stairs as I was desperately trying to fix the holes over my eyes. The door was shutting just as I turned around. “She was blonde” was the only information I could get from my bribed sleuths. They were too interested in the loot.

The world largest Internet dating site, Match.com did a survey on what silly things people do for love, and here are the results:

35% of the women wear thongs and don’t eat foods that make them windy. THAT is just way too much suffering for me. Not to mention studying up on their love’s favorite football team or watching a war movie and pretending to be into both of them.

57% of the men admitted to sitting through chick flicks and feigning a liking for Hugh Grant. They even changed their sheets and passed up a night with the boys. 40% pretended they liked shopping.

Even though we all have done silly things for love, it’s here to stay, my friends, so I will end with this chorus:

“Here’s lookin’ at you kid. Missing all the things we did. We can find it once again, I know… just like they did in Key Largo.”