Where did we go?

LITTLE ROCK — The notion of having one’s social consciousness raised or raising someone else’s was a late-Sixties phenomenon at best.

That’s not to suggest that no one was doing it. They just didn’t call it that. While black people and a relative handful of white sympathizers, mostly from Hollywood, the New York stage and Northern universities, were marching-hence, being bloodied-in Southern streets in the name of civil rights, my preteen set was trying to win free records by counting the number of song titles mentioned in a novelty tune played every evening on the Mighty 1090.

I came close to winning. Unfortunately, the song “Denise” had been popular right before I started listening to radio stations that didn’t play music by anyone named Hank, so I missed that one. I did much better with a game called Beatle Ball, where the DJ played, in rapid succession, bits of lyrics from four or five Beatle songs and you had to be the first caller to identify all of them. I cleaned up-and this was before speed-dialing, mind you.

No, white-bread kids like us didn’t know anything about effecting change or embracing righteous causes. Our notion of social derring-do was to put beans in our ears. That’s right, beans. In the ears.

Even on that score, I was a bit of a wimp, so Mama never had to hustle me to the emergency room to have one surgically removed, but it was a minor fad for a time that reportedly did send some youngsters to their doctors.

What else would you expect? It was the heyday of Top 40 radio, and hardly an hour went by without the Serendipity Singers coyly singing about a child whose mother told him not to put beans in his ear. Naturally, untold numbers of kids with a rebellious streak promptly did so. From there, it was downhill all the way: long hair,loud music, joss sticks and the Summer of Love. I wouldn’t be surprised if some anthropologist doesn’t trace the eventual tumult in American society as I knew it then to this very song.

There’s a strong argument to be made that civilization as our parents knew it actually began its nose-dive with the emergence of Elvis the Pelvis, but being on the tail end of the Baby Boomers, I missed out on that. Fifties pandemonium was breaking out all around me while I was still playing with paper dolls. Why, I didn’t see “Blackboard Jungle” until years later on TV.

Don’t get me wrong. I knew the music of the Fifties backward and forward, from fellow whitebreaders like Bill Haley and the Comets to the raw agitation of Little Richard. I wasn’t even school-age yet when Daddy brought home our first yellow Sun records from Nashville. (How much would that 78of “Blue Moon of Kentucky/That’s Alright, Mama” be worth today? Considering how often it got played, not very much. Those old phonograph needles were hell on 78s.)

No, for me the first taste of rebellion came with sneaking up to the balcony of a local movie theater-I think it was the Arkansas-to do the Twist while Chubby Checker demonstrated the dance on the screen because the ushers had stopped us from doing it downstairs. Chubby, now 68, is still twistin’. Earlier this month, he celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first release of his single, “The Twist,” bygiving a free concert in his hometown of Philadelphia.

For trivia collectors, Chubby’s version was released twice, in 1960 and 1962, and reached No. 1 both times. It was actually a cover version of the Hank Ballard and the Midnighters original written by Ballard and released in 1959, and it’s what popularized dancing without touching your partner. Or without needing a partner at all, for that matter.

“When you’re on the floor dancing to Lady Gaga, Chubby Checker is there,” he told a reporter.

But back to that movie theater. I can’t say that it was truly a consciousness-raising moment when the usher caught on to our subterfuge and threatened to evict us if we didn’t behave ourselves, but certainly we were rebels looking for a cause from that moment on.

I guess most of us embrace new ideas, the breaking out and the breaking away, in fits and starts, hardly any ofthem profound. Everyone has to start somewhere. Although our group was too young and too cocooned to partake of most of the changes going on around us, we watched and waited and experimented where we could. A little surreptitious twisting here, a forbidden miniskirt there, a little angst and a lot of mascara, then bang! Real life, adult life, our turn to let those crazy kids dance or throw them out of the theater. Some got it. Most didn’t.

We were supposed to be different, to make a difference, to change the world for the better, not to repeat history. Where are we? Where did we go?

Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page. An earlier version of today’s column appeared on Oct. 6, 2004.