for Tim Dlugos

Lesley Gore got her rival good
in the smash answer to "It's My Party,"
"Judy's Turn To Cry," when her
unfaithful boyfriend, Johnny, suddenly
came to his senses in the midst
of yet another apparently unchaperoned shindig.
I picture Judy - hot pink mini-dress
and ratted black hair - being swept away
by a flood of her own teenage tears.
In triumph, Lesley rehangs Johnny's ring
around her neck. She has no idea that
the British are coming, that her popularity
will wane and she'll watch her hits drop
off the charts like so many tinkling
heart-shaped charms, and that there she'll be:
a has-been at seventeen. Naturally
she'll finish high school and marry
Johnny. They'll have a couple of kids
and settle down in a yellow two-story
tract house with white-shuttered windows
and bright red flower beds. At the supermart,
Lesley will fill her cart with frozen dinners,
which she'll serve with a smile as the family
gathers round their first color TV.
Week after week, she'll exchange recipes,
attend PTA meetings and Tupperware parties,
usher Brownie troops past tar pits
and towering dinosaur bones. Whenever
she hears one of her songs on an oldie station,
she'll think about those extinct beasts.
She'll think about them too as, year
after year, she tosses headlines
into the trash: Vietnam, Nixon, Patty Hearst.
Then one afternoon - her children grown
and gone - she'll discover a strange
pair of earrings in the breast pocket
of Johnny's business suit. It's downhill
after that: curlers, migraines, fattening
midnight snacks. Or is it? She did,
after all, sing "You Don't Own Me,"
the first pop song with a feminist twist.
What if Lesley hears about women's lib?
What if she goes into therapy and begins
to question her attraction to emotionally
unavailable men? Suppose, under hypnosis,
she returns to her sixteenth birthday party,
relives all those tears, and learns that
it was Judy - not Johnny - she'd wanted
all along. There's no answer to that
song, of course, but I have
heard rumors.

By David Trinidad