Mockingbirds and Lip-synchers

One of my all-time favorite movies is To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck. I can especially relate to the scene where the little girl, played by Mary Badham, forced to walk home alone in the dark wearing a cumbersome yam costume, is chased by a killer, but rescued in the nick of time by an enigmatic recluse played by Robert Duvall. I can relate because a similar thing happened to me when I was in 7th grade. Well, it wasn’t really that similar – I wasn’t chased by a killer, and I wasn’t dressed like a yam, and I wasn’t even a little girl, and there were no enigmatic recluses around to rescue me, but I did have to walk home alone once in the dark in a humiliating costume. 

We had a talent show at Ramona School that night, and Hank, Eddie and I had dressed up as Beachboys and lip-synched several of their hits – Surfin’ Safari and Surfin’ USA. At that time, lip-synching was a relatively new and little understood talent, having only just been discovered several years earlier by Lloyd Thaxton, a local television celebrity. Thaxton hosted an after-school television show for teenagers in Los Angeles, where he played popular music, much like Dick Clark on American Bandstand, and each day he would have kids from a different local high school dance on the set and pretend to be young and exuberant and not alienated and misunderstood, as we all know we were.  Often he would paint faces on his fingers and move them to the music, or he would pretend to sing, which he dubbed lip synching. Now it’s called lip-dubbing, but it’s a whole new phenomenon, at least if you don’t remember Thaxton it’s new.

Our little group couldn’t have been very good that evening because none of us had ever been near a surf-board let alone actually surfed, and to this day I still don’t know the names of half of the cities, whose names we were mouthing in Surfin’ Safari. I knew that they were “angling in Laguna and kicking out in Doheny,” but that’s as much as I understood of the song. Still we had a lot of fun wearing our baggies and pretending we were ho-dads.

It wasn’t enough that I felt foolish that evening walking home alone in the dark wearing that costume, but as I turned onto Maryton Street I spied a gang of older boys coming toward me in pack formation, so there was no way I could slip past them undetected. When they were close enough I recognized most of them as classmates of my brother, who was three years older than me, and I had barely let out a sigh of relief, when one of them suddenly reached out and grabbed me by the shirt collar and pressed me up against one of the trees that lined the street. Then another boy pulled out a funny, wavy-looking knife and held it up threateningly.  

I recognized the knife immediately as the same Malayan throwing knife that my brother and I had been looking at in a mail-order catalog several weeks earlier, and as soon as I saw it I began to laugh. This made the boy with the knife angry, and suddenly his face got all contorted and he pressed the sharp tip into my throat. Just then a tougher boy that I knew from my own street stepped out and saved me, “Ah, let him go. He’s just a punk.”

Since then I’ve been attacked several times for real. In Japan once I was accosted in an alley by two black sailors off of an aircraft carrier, when they were having race riots aboard their ship. I had just walked past them, when I suddenly felt a feeling of impending danger, and sure enough one of them had come back and punched me with his fist hard in the ear. Just then, down the far end of the alley, I saw several SPs walking past, and my assailant must have seen the same thing because he and his friend abruptly turned and ran away. Another time three Japanese men clubbed me from behind, and they too ran away when I didn’t immediately go down, but spun quickly around and hit the man with the club square with my fist. I never actually saw the man, but I felt the sinews in his jaw, and then something felt like it gave way.

I have never personally felt any need in my life to travel as part of a pack, or attack somebody who chooses to walk alone, but I have often wondered what sort of person does.

——————–End of Story———————————-

You can read more about Lloyd Thaxton at Wikipedia:
Lloyd Thaxton at Wikipedia

Read more about lip-synching at Lloyd Thaxton’s Blog.
Lloyd Thaxton’s Blog

~ by dobee on April 16, 2007.