it was summer school
but you brought me to church
laid out like a girl
on my mother’s couch
and the whole world stopped
on that july night
when the rules that we learned
diverged from our lives
after work on the town we kissed
as the sun got low
when the light was all gone
and the square emptied out
you reached for my hand
and put it under your blouse
my heart skipped a beat
when you opened my mouth
and the whole world stopped
on that july night
and i prayed for the first time out loud
in 17 years of life
mother forgive me
mother you knew
mother there’s something
i’ve got to tell you
joni mitchell at dawn
who could forget
and dancing at merriman’s
in their back room
when the music stopped
on that july night
we kept singing as loud as we could
we kept singing for life
when the music stops
on a july night
we sing for ourselves
we sing for our lives
we sing for ourselves
we sing for our lives
today’s audio is a demo of a song i wrote this summer for my weekly songwriting group. the prompt was SUMMER SCHOOL, which was a delight to work with.
in the summer of 1992, just after my freshman year in high school, i indeed went to summer school, not to make up a class or to get ahead in academics, but to get my driver’s license. in virginia, you had to be 15 and 8 months to get a learner’s permit, and in order to get a learner’s you had to take 10th grade gym. i have a fall birthday and was nearly 6 when i went to kindergarten, meaning that if i took 10th grade gym early i could be driving on my 16th birthday at the beginning of 10th grade, nearly a full year before any of my friends. the possibilities were too good to pass up: freedom, independence, cool points.
so i went to summer school, saved my wages from my job framing pictures and selling art supplies (still my favorite job i’ve ever had, even better than music), and bought a tiny used sky blue mazda pickup. the previous owner had had it lowered and affixed yosemite same mud flaps along with decals of naked women in silhouette on the back. perfect for my smart-ass high school self.
i drove this truck until i went to college. the alternator was iffy, so the lights and display often flickered while the speed of the tape deck was tied to the speed of the truck. at stoplights, i would put the truck in park and rev the engine so my bootlegged dave mathews’s shows could continue to play at the correct speed, or near enough.
i had a wonderful group of friends at this time, composed of kids from my grade and the one above. on the long afternoons of days between sports seasons, we all hung out in the student parking lot then we put as many people as we thought we could get away with into the back of my pickup truck and went to little caesar’s or 7-11. if you were on the honor roll, little caesars gave you free garlic breadsticks. we were all on the honor roll. it was a garlic breadstick nerd party. other days, when we went to 7-11, we bought camel lights, dried chitlins to eat unironically, tried to get older friends to buy us 40s, and drank slurpees.
The actual 7-11 i grew up going to.
well, everyone drank slurpees except for me. as a kid, i didn’t have much of a sweet tooth. dessert was never served in our house, and there was no sugar cereal or candy in the cupboard. on sweet summer nights, we occasionally waited in line at the iconic carl’s for frozen custards (carl is 75% named for this place and 25% for karl marx). but something about the not-found-in-nature color of a slurpee and its mushy disappear-in-your-mouth texture was not appealing to me.
Carl’s, Fredericksburg VA, since 1947.
my friends noticed this right away. they’d try any which way to get me to take a sip, a slurp, convinced that once i tried it, i would love it.
i resisted. this is a character trait i am proud of. i love to resist. just as carl lives to plant his feet and refuse to move. just as carl loves to race ahead, dragging me behind as i try to slow him down, i love to resist. push or pull at me, and i too will plant my feet.
hey yall - let’s take our break here! i keep forgetting to promote this substack when i do interviews or play shows. so it would be a big help to me if you would tell a friend or share this episode. and i promise to do a better job in the new year of promoting this thing. but now that everyone is fleeing twitter, come to my substack for the honesty, stay for the audio.
speaking of 2023, this is the time of year when many of your subscriptions to this newsletter will be expiring. if you like what i’ve done over the past 16 episodes, please consider re-upping for another year. and if you’re not a subscriber, please consider joining for as little as $5 a month. surprise! you don’t get anything special when you do that, but you do help me continue to be a professional artist in the changing world. thank you!
it became a “thing” among our friend group, my not having a slurpee. i loved the distinction of never having even sipped this iconic symbol of artifice and chemical refreshment. i fancied myself pure of heart and unsullied by blue dye no. 15.
we all began to use the term “slurpee” for a common cultural thing that someone had never done. we had endless afternoons, sitting in the back of my truck carefully cultivating our personal slurpee lists. at the time, some of my slurpees included never having seen “star wars”, never having worn a bikini, and never having kissed a girl.
i was thinking of this last slurpee when the SUMMER SCHOOL prompt came into my inbox this past july. i’ve been working on a musical memoir project this year about my virginia childhood, so these summer memories have been close to the surface.
as the song tells, my experience with my first queer kiss is woven out of the fabric of my vibrant hometown memories. of streets and sounds and community. quite a few of us in that posse that hung out in the back of my pickup were proto-queers or queer adjacent. of course we had no language like that at the time. we just knew we felt different, that we wanted different things than some of our other friends.
for my 37th birthday, i did a radio spot with my friend monte belmonte, where i named 37 slurpees. when i made a new website in the summer of 2020, i updated the list. here are a few things that at age 45 are still slurpees for me:
never have i ever:
changed a tire
worn contacts
seen an episode of “the sopranos”
eaten cotton candy or lucky charms
been to yankee candle
seen star wars
had a slurpee
in the real world, it seems like our country just barely avoided an electoral apocalypse, but i still feel horrible about the general state of things. call me resistant, but the more fucked up the world gets, the more i feel like i just need some good-old-fashioned nonsense. what have you never done that you’re proud of never doing? i’d love to see your slurpees in the comments for this post.
x erin
ps - your #carlcontent
hey girl, come here often? … because i just got neutered!
¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!
i am a sensitive bunny when it comes to jet lag, so enjoyed this article about how the tampa bay bucs prepared for their NFL game in munich this morning.
i just saw “wakanda forever”. spoiler alert: it has #battlewhales. i didn’t dig it as much as “black panther”, but that doesn’t matter in the least. the fact that they even made it at all without the iconic chadwick boseman is amazing.
omg this story of a plane crash in the andes. told by one of my favorite outdoor personalities, blair braverman.
a beautiful portrait of high school mariachis in south texas.
some red-sox legends share a house in cooperstown. CLICK!
i just finished this amazing book about puppies. the author is a noted dog cognition researcher (um, maybe thats the coolest job ever), and the book is her informed experience of getting a puppy in the pandemic. it’s just scientific enough and encouraged me to experience and observe carl in new and awesome ways.
UPCOMING SHOWS
Nov 19 - Jamestown RI
TICKETS
***
Nov 3 - 13 - Santa Barbara CA
Miss You Like Hell at Out Of The Box Theater
TICKETS
Nov 10 - 19 - Wilkes-Barre PA
Miss You Like Hell at King’s College
MORE INFO
Nov 17 - 21 - Richmond VA
Miss You Like Hell at University of Richmond
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LOOKING AHEAD TO 2023
Jan 19 - Feb 19 - San Jose CA
Miss You Like Hell at City Lights
MORE INFO
Oct 14 - Nov 11 - Seattle WA
Miss You Like Hell at Strawberry Theatre
MORE INFO
If you have further questions or concerns about COVID protocols, please contact the venues directly.
Reminder, Erin does not appear in productions of Miss You Like Hell
never have i ever