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Barry Manilow, Please Leave My Brain

Now that I am in the last year of my seventh decade on earth, I notice that my memory can sometimes fail me. What did I have for dinner two nights ago? I might not remember.  Where did I use to park my car every day in the late 70s when I would take the Market-Frankford El to work in downtown Philly? I would have to guess at that answer. What’s the name of that friendly colleague whom I would see occasionally at meetings for a number of years? The name might not be there for me.

However, theme songs from silly TV comedies of the 1960s, such as My Mother the Car and It’s About Time, are right there ready for me to access. Those songs did not become iconic or famous, such as the theme to Gilligan’s Island or Hawaii Five-0. Yet, they are alive in my brain over half a century since I heard them on a weekly basis.

How does that all work?  I can remember a song that I haven’t heard since 1968 but cannot easily remember something that happened two days ago? A bit of Googling turns up the info that within the brain, memory has three different elements – encoding, storage and retrieval. The encoding takes place at the initial stage while the other two come later. A memory is retrieved when specific groups of neurons are activated from storage. And there seems to be a connection between music and memory.

I must have been doing some damn good encoding while watching those stupid TV shows.

In addition to theme songs, I have a readily accessible store of jingles from television commercials of that era. And there is none more prominent in my noggin than the one for the Polaroid Swinger.

The Polaroid Corporation developed the world’s first instant camera and marketed it shortly after World War II. It produced black and white prints in sixty seconds. After waiting for the required time, the user removed the film from the camera and peeled off the negative side, leaving a positive print. In the mid-60s, the Polaroid Swinger was introduced and became a hit, propelled by its low price point and its marketing campaign. A key part of that campaign was television commercials and a more-than-catchy jingle, Meet the Swinger

It is that jingle that is ever-present in my brain, and I cannot rid myself of it. The singer was Barry Manilow, well before he gained fame first as Bette Midler’s accompanist and later as a bestselling recording artist himself. Although Manilow wrote other commercial jingles of the time, on Meet the Swinger, he was the performer only. It was written by Mitch Leigh, a musical theater composer best known for Man of La Mancha.

The lyrics are:

Hey, meet the Swinger, the Polaroid Swinger

Meet the Swinger, the Polaroid Swinger

It’s more than a camera, it’s almost alive

It’s only nineteen dollars and ninety-five

Swing it up, it says yes

Take the shot, count it down, zip it off

Hey, meet the Swinger, the Polaroid Swinger

NOTES:

  1. I did not need to look up those words. They are emblazoned in my mind with neurons that are forever activated.
  2. I did not ask for permission to reproduce the lyrics here. I am sure that someone owns the copyright, as the composition was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office by Andrew Scott Inc. in 1967. If that entity wishes for me to remove the words from this post, I will. And if they can tell me how to eliminate the words from my head, I would be quite appreciative. 

It is quite ironic. I cannot recall the nuggets I want to remember while I cannot forget the stuff that I wish to leave behind. Go figure.