I’m ashamed but only a little frankly, and only retrospectively. I certainly wasn’t ashamed at the time. What’s remarkable is that nobody told me it was a bad idea. And I had no idea at the time that it was a bad idea. That’s what’s really peculiar about the memory.

When I was a kid, we had two essential Christmas 8 tracks. I don’t know what has become of them since. And I certainly don’t know what they were. But I know, or rather I would know them again immediately, if only by the order the songs are in. One of the 8 tracks was more instrumental. But the one I listened to the most, it was orange, had most of my now favorite songs on it. One song it had was Santa Baby. It wasn’t Eartha Kitt.

It was grade 4 or grade 5. We were putting on a Christmas show the last Friday of the year. We were asked to prepare something. So I taped that song from the 8 track. And for a few days I suppose I must have practiced lip synching the song. Me, perhaps 9 or 10, singing Santa Baby. Nobody told me I shouldn’t. Nobody told me it was inappropriate. I knew the song had a playfulness I thought was cute but I didn’t know more than that. I was without any kind of guile or shame or sophistication.

Now that I think of it, I don’t know how I knew all the words. I certainly didn’t have the lyrics. And I wouldn’t have known what a duplex was. When I practiced the song, I pretended to be what I thought was coy or slinky. We had to perform it. I’m actually a little horrified by the memory. And, at the age of 9 or 10, there I was in front of my class on a December afternoon, sitting on a desk in a dimmed public school gym, pretending to sing Santa Baby. Not my parents, not my brother, not my friends, and not my teachers, nobody told me it was a bad idea. I suppose my teachers must have thought it was funny if a little grotesque.

I still like the song, I suppose. But every time I hear it, I get a little shiver down my spine.

SS