Performer: Yes
Songwriters: Jon Anderson, Chris Squire
Original Release: Fragile
Year: 1971
Definitive Version: Yessongs, 1973, for Chris Squire’s thunderous bass
solo in The Fish
Girls were a complete
mystery to me in high school. Actually, it might just be elementary, dear
Watson: I wanted the girls I couldn’t have and wasn’t interested in the ones I
could.
Take the curious case of
Anita and Darlene, frinstance.
Sometime my junior year, I
think, Mike took me to a house party of a fellow employee of his at the Big
Bear grocery store. It probably was the most sedate house party you’ve ever seen.
It was in a pretty nice, Sixties-style home in Upper Arlington, and it was what
I thought adult parties were like: no dancing, people sitting around talking,
nobody just getting wasted.
One of the people at the
party was a girl named Jane, whom Mike and I knew. She was in one of my classes
and she was cool. You know what that means, right? That means she’d talk to me.
I can’t remember why she was at the party, because I didn’t think she worked at
Big Bear, but I ended up talking to her about music. I think I had just
discovered Yes and bought Fragile, and I distinctly remember her talking about
this particular song.
Anyway, Jane was
unavailable, but through her I met Anita. Mike and I were at the Ohio State
Fair the summer before our senior year, and we decided to check out a local
band named Cirrus, who was playing a small side soundstage. Jane was there as
well as a friend of hers named Anita, whom I didn’t know.
Anita and I got along real
well as Cirrus played competent cover song after cover song, and she seemed to
be available. There definitely was an opportunity to ask her out—or at least
pursue it. I didn’t.
Why didn’t I ask out Anita?
The best answer might be I was an idiot, but at least part of the real answer
was I was holding a candle for Darlene.
I met Darlene early my
junior year, and we also got along real well. In fact, she gave me her number
and told me to call her. Excellent, right? Well, it was up until the moment
that I called one night and her mother told me that she was coming in from her
date at the moment. D’OH!
Darlene was dating a college
guy, and I guess it was more serious than I was led on to believe, and—make no
mistake—I was led to believe a lot. It became this weird push-and-pull
relationship that I let affect me far more than I should have and let carry on
far longer than I should have.
It reached a point where I
felt that for the emotional investment I had made, I deserved to have first
crack when she broke up with her boyfriend, which she did senior year. However,
by the time I learned of this, she already was with another older guy. By that
time, Anita also was off the market. Double D’OH!
So, I didn’t date much in
high school. The clues as to why all point to me as the culprit, of course.
It’s a fair cop but maybe, just maybe, society was to blame. I submit the
following alibi: Within three weeks of graduation, I began to date a beautiful
girl who didn’t go to Upper Arlington.
It might just have been
coincidental. It probably was just luck. But maybe, just maybe it was that UA
GIRLS were a mystery to me. That’s my story, and I'm sticking to it. Case closed.
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