Total Eclipse of the Heart… By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

May 23, 2012 Whitney Farmer 8 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an MBA, and digs astronomy.

It was strange to see it on TV after all of these years. My Canadian wrestler crush on Chris Jericho led me to watch “George Lopez” and capture the man-on-man duet with David Arquette, annihilating Bonnie Tyler’s forever anthem “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. Once when Jericho came to the club, I put my Doc Martens in Mouth during a prom-like photo and said, “My Dad is going to freak out!” He looked at me, smelling all clean yet muscled, and seemed perplexed. He didn’t realize what an honor it was to appear on my Dad’s radar. The closest contender(s) to pull my Dad away from his epic book every three days habit are the slit mouthed Canadian characters on “South Park” who do all ‘…according to custom…’ My Canadian father keeps track of his Northern tribe.

When Jericho and Arquette sang their hearts out to each other, it was good – but not as great as it had been when the comedy bit first came to life and was unleashed on the world. I was there…

It was almost a decade earlier, at the Red Chariot in Van Nuys, a karaoke dive that later lost its lease to Starbucks. At inception, the Tyler tribute burned hot and bright as MOTU sang to and about his duet partner, the nearly translucent light-skinned Jason who would soon leave L.A. to move back to Chicago and work at the Ray Bradbury Theater in ‘Waukegan’. Like Connecticut, I have no idea where in the world it is located. So he is lost to me.

They changed the words to fit their un-duplicable circumstances…

Turn around…
Every now and then I get a little bit crazy and I think of White Girls…

And if you only hold me tight – TONIGHT! – you’ll be holding on to my sweater…

There’s nothing I can do! I’m really really dark! We’re living in the Valley and givin’ off sparks…

The next selection on rotation that gave homage to Bonnie Tyler was usually “You Need a Negro”, sung to the tune of “I Need a Hero”. Bonnie might have gotten BMI royalties from it, but it was almost unrecognizable, so it’s hard to say. Calling it sampling would have been generous. And there is also the possibility that she wouldn’t have wanted to be associated with it.

Outside of the Alice into the Rabbit Hole that is dive bar karaoke, the anthem of a love that is obscured and darkened by obstacles still sounds great. If anyone dared play it on the radio, I would blast it.

Before our shielded eyes last weekend, a full eclipse walked across the sky over So Cal. As it began, all the dogs in the neighborhood began to bark, alerting us that”…Hey Everybody! We’re all going to die!” Only seaweed treats from Trader Joe’s shut them up. They had a good point. From our vantage point, it was as if the sun had quadrupled in size but had lost its power. Like a dying heart that gets weaker as it gets bigger, it swelled as the strength of its light diminished to amber.

What must the ancients have thought…? Wiki says that the name ‘ékleipsis’ means ‘the abandonment’, ‘the downfall’, or more accurately but just as portentous ‘the darkening of a heavenly body’. None of those things sound good. Perhaps it best to think of it simply as something that blocks us from the light of our life. It goes away by not fighting it, but by continuing to move on our course. Yes, some obstacles we can move out of the way. Others are resolved by simply moving in the direction we are meant to go. Eventually, the darkening body becomes a diminishing object in the rear view mirror.

It might also be wise to remember that the thing which causes the pall to wash over everything is always smaller than our sun. Only for a particular time in our orbit do things look dreary.

And after the howling, it’s time for us to get a treat.

Quote of the Blog, from Ed, Dude of Light and Fog, said at approximately 1:30 a.m. PST: “I’m going home to have a steak. I thought I was coming down with something like the flu, you know? I was weak and dizzy and my stomach hurt. Then I thought about it and said ‘Hey! I forgot to eat today!’ Then I realized that I hadn’t eaten yesterday either.”

Photo courtesy of my cell phone on ‘Solar’ mode.