Make Me Love You:
Public, Part One
Public, Part Two
Private

This is what I remember all of a sudden:

When we were younger, much younger, my grandmother (rest peacefully, you crazy lady) (I loved her, by the way) (quite a bit) told my brother that she would buy him Anything He Wanted for his upcoming birthday.

Okay, that phrase had the power to stop me in my tracks when I was a kid. The power to make my pants spontaneously wrinkle. The power to send me into a dizzy spiral of greed and intense thing-lust.

Anything You Want.

Which means, I get to choose.

Oh, the heady excitement.

For this birthday, my brother chose Prince Charming by Adam Ant. Or possibly Adam and the Ants, I don't feel like looking it up right now. It was definitely Prince Charming. And Adam Ant was the dude. That's all you need to know, so let it go.

Of course, the way this Anything You Want always worked was that Grandma accompanied us to the store so that she could wildly and with total abandon, be involved in this gift-choosing event.

Tremendously exciting, it must have been.

With me, personally, she would most likely have spent hours in the doll aisle. Because I used to be much more girl (though still not overly so...not nearly so much as, say, my sister, the very definition of femininity and unicorn purple) (then) and I used to have all kinds of motherly instincts. It was sick. People would come into my room and go, "What's that smell? Is that...motherly instinct?"

All that fell out at some point. I think I used it all up, like those special endorphins Jason was telling me about. Just "Oops! There it goes!" and it went woosh right down the drain.

Too bad.

Anyway.

Into the music store, and over to the racks of vinyl (which back then were quaintly referred to as "records"). It would have been the A rack. Because Adam Ant and Adam and the Ants would both be under A. Didn't I tell you to let it go?

My brother found the album and presented it to Grandma, who, already suspicious at having been brought into a record store in the first place and also cursed with a bad heart that was at the time being forced along in its duties by a pacemaker, clutched at her chest and gasped, "Punk rock!"

Yes, I know that this is the type of thing that you usually hear in movies and Twisted Sister videos, but she actually said it. Yes, yes she did.

Ah Violet, we hardly knew ye.

The point of this little story is that Grandma, with her righteous shock and possibly in need of a good, hearty nap, purchased the record for my brother anyway. Because, she had promised. Anything He Wanted. And Violet was good for her word, that much was true.

It was a damned good thing What He Wanted wasn't a nipple piercing. As it was, I'm thinking Adam (Ant or the Ants, I don't know, okay?) probably shaved a good ten or so years off her already shortened life expectancy.

Good thing I didn't tell her I had a crush on Boy George.

And in closing, I say to Louise: yeah, well, I lost em too. Yeah. It's all about me.

But anyway, all of you. The ones that are still here, I know who you are. I think. Either way, smooches.

-Mlle R