I’m standing outside one of the KGAF bookstores, idly browsing through random coffee-table books including several as tall as my daughter with spectacular photographs. Rs 1271 for those, which is about Rs 1270 more than I’m carrying, so I resist the urge successfully.
But then the wife who forms a major part of the couple to my right giggles and tells her husband: “Supercars, masterpieces of design and engineering!” This strikes me as an odd thing to say to your husband on a random Sunday afternoon, until I catch sight of a book under my nose with that very title. Has a very sporty looking grey Mercedes on the cover.
He picks up the book, flips through it and puts it back, saying “Na, na!”
Then she reaches over and, with a huge grin, hands him a book on the cover of which a muscular lifeguard carries an apparently unconscious woman in a sleek swimsuit cut impossibly high on the thigh. “Baywatch!” she says (the wife, not the woman in the swimsuit), because that’s the title of the book.
He doesn’t even flip through it. He says “Na, na!” and puts it back.
The man’s turned down a book on flashy cars and a book likely filled with women in swimsuits? What am I, standing next to the Mr Geek Universe titleholder himself? Maybe he invested his hard-earned rupees in the book that lies between those other two, by name “The Complete Office Handbook”?
But then to my left, a young woman drags a reluctant young man in bermudas and a baseball cap to the book display. Across her chest, in glitter, is “bebe”. Across his chest, in white, is the edifying message “I don’t mind coming to work, it’s the 8 hour wait to go home that’s a bitch”. She reaches out and hands him a three-book set wrapped in plastic. It has the fascinating title “Discover Creative Solutions to Everyday Challenges.” She mutters something at him about how he should buy it and read it.
He looks at it and nearly flings it back on the pile. “No, no”, he says.
What is this, Get Hubby To Buy Useless Books Day at KGAF ‘09?
***
To much nodding and bopping in the audience, a very noisy band plays rock. “Ru-Ba-Ru” is one of the songs, and the singer manages to lean over a partition and stick the mike into a passing lady’s face, whereupon she croons into it but we don’t hear her voice and he shrugs. Next they play one of their own compositions, called “Bas Karo“. I bump into a friend in the crowd as they are playing, and he yells in my ear “Really awful band, no?”
I wouldn’t have said that, but they are indeed noisy. Next on stage is a band called The Other People. Now I heard these other guys a couple of years ago somewhere, and then they played one of my favourites, “Mony Mony”. At the end, the singer announced that this was a Billy Idol song. This is the kind of factoid that makes music-obsessed old geezers such as myself splutter through our dentures, because “Mony Mony” was originally composed and sung by Tommy James and the Shondells in the late 1960s, and covered by Idol in the ’80s.
So after that show, I went up to the guy as he wandered through the crowd and said to him through my dentures, “Good show, but Mony Mony isn’t by Billy Idol, dammit!”
And I’ve run into the guy a few times since, like today after their gig, and he always breaks into a big grin and points to me and says, “I know you!” (It’s the dentures, they give me away).
Today, they sing “Twist and Shout”, “La Bamba” and “Walk of Life”, among others. So when I run into him later, and he says “I know you!”, I say, “Hey, I enjoyed it, but too bad you didn’t sing Mony Mony! I was waiting for it. But I liked that Billy Joel tune.”
That one was “You May Be Right.” I jumped and clapped so much my arthritis started acting up.
