The Sounds Of Sirens
by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman

A friend manages a CD store. He says, "In the old days of selling records, then CDs, when a record was big it was big for six months, maybe a year. Now, three days, maybe four. We sell 15 copies a day of the biggest, bazillion-selling hit, and four days later, we can't get rid of the leftovers." In honor of our appallingly short attention span, Your Darling, Your Diva, Your One True Love points at your brain and giggles fetchingly.

Three people sit in a Friday's, slurping melted cheese on potatoes, melted cheese on meat, melted cheese on pasta. Piped-in music has been varied, to say the least, including the Partridge Family among the startling selections. Our diners, well into their second beers, gasp at Layla as dinner music. Suddenly, a moral dilemma: scavenge for dull, round soup spoons with which to slit wrists before the piano solo or prevent one's friends from finding same?

1. A radio commercial that makes sense: Cheryl Crow's A Change Would Do You Good under a Jiffy Lube ad. Okay, okay, certainly, we've got nouns and verbs and changing - I get it - changing is desirable, alrighty!

2. A TV commercial that makes Your Petite Chou Chou long for a big mallet: automobiles, winding roads, hamfisted remake of Chris Isaaks' Wicked Game. He's an expert, consumers, don't try singing like this at home. You'll sprain your annual percentage rate.

3. A TV commercial that makes white noise seem sonorous: Toyota financing extravaganza set to The Fixx's Saved By Zero. Hmm. Hmm. Part of the charm of The Fixx was holding a stopwatch to when singer Cy Curnin would self-destruct. Wait a minute, wait just a minute ... there's a clue here, I'm almost sure of it...

4. A final TV commercial that makes Your Sweet Nothing want to get very, very dirty: it's a Hoover Steam Vac, brightly colored rotating bristles, and Dead Or Alive's You Spin Me Round. No. No, no. No. In fact, thinking about it, you should be dripping sweat, staring at a smiling co-ed and emptying the C batteries from your pockets. Do you get it? You do? What are you thinking about Hoovering?

You're standing in a bar. A man you dread meeting amuses your friends, so he strikes up conversation. He tends to ask questions like, "Do you think I *shouldn't* have told the Catholic school cheerleader I'd fluff her secular pompoms?" so you turn away. There's a man you avoid making eye contact with because after two shots, he'll hotwire your house and mow your car. Quick! Look away! Flee! Stacked with the East Coast Rocker and Aquarian Weekly is a slick, suspect music mag put out by CD World, Mu'Zine. Nobody reads corporate music magazines unless threatened with hotwiring, mowing and fluffing. You hold this magazine very conspicuously in front of your face, barely leaving room between page and flesh for the passage of oxygen. You're desperate, and STUNNED to find an interesting albeit brief interview with Leonard Cohen. Wait. Leonard Cohen? Philosopher, poet, meditative soul? On the same pages as Juvenile? That's almost as crazy as a bunch of guys sitting in a room, brainstorming on a new kind of now, kind of hip Star Trek theme, and one guys says, "Hey! What if we dumb-down a Bryan Adams song..."

The smartest thing Your Tasty Morsel heard this week came from a friend who'd given up giving up coffee. In other words, she'd driven through Dunkin' Donuts and exuberantly drove to work with a hotcup the size of her head, declaring somnambulance SO over and caffeine season open: "That's why I take drugs! They feel GREAT!"

©2001 Robin Pastorio-Newman