Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (20 page)

T
o be honest, I had completely forgotten that in a former life I was Mozart. You know how certain things tend to slip your mind, like where you left your car keys, or the fact that you used to be a brilliant Austrian composer who died in 1791? Well, that’s exactly what happened to me.

I was reminded of my former life recently when I received a book called
Spirit at Work
, by Lois Grant, who has had a number of former lives. (I realize that some of you may be skeptical about the idea of reincarnation, but there’s a lot of evidence that it’s real. Exhibit A is Vice President Al Gore, who obviously, at some point in his previous existence, was a slab of Formica.)

Besides having been reincarnated, Lois Grant is in close personal touch with many spiritual entities, including her deceased cat, Fluffernut, and the Archangel Michael, who has written a nice blurb for the cover of
Spirit at Work
, which he calls “a key to the rebirth of the planet.” (I myself have never gotten a blurb quite that positive, although one of my books was described as being “heavy on the booger jokes,” which is similar.)

Anyway, it turns out that one whole chapter of
Spirit at Work
is devoted to some correspondence that Lois Grant and I had back in 1991. It began when she wrote me a long letter, in which she said that she had been asking herself the question—I bet you’ve asked this question many times—“Where is Mozart now?” So she decided to contact Joya Pope, who serves as a “channeler” for a spiritual entity named Michael, who is “a group of 1,050 souls who have completed their cycle of lives on the Earth.” (Sounds like the U.S. Congress!)

Through Joya—who according to the book “is available for channeling by telephont”—Lois Grant asked Michael about the current whereabouts of Mozart. The answer was: “He is a writer living in Florida.” On a hunch, Lois Grant sent Joya a photograph of me from the newspaper, and the answer came back that the current reincarnation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is none other than—you guessed it—Wayne Newton.

No, seriously, according to Lois Grant, Joya/Michael says that I used to be Mozart. I was quite surprised to learn this, and you would have been, too, if you had seen me take piano lessons. This was in 1956, when the piano teacher, a woman named Mrs. Ugly Old Bat, used to come to my house every Saturday on her broom and point out to my mother that I apparently had not been practicing.

This was of course true. I was nine years old, and I had better things to do with my time than sit around staring at a music book filled with tiny inscrutable black marks and trying to figure out which ones corresponded with which specific keys on the piano. As far as I was concerned, our piano had WAY too many keys on it anyway. I would have much
preferred a piano with a total of two large keys, one white and one black; or maybe even just one really large gray key, so you’d never have any doubt which one you were supposed to hit.

But our piano had
THOUSANDS
of keys, stretching out for approximately a mile in either direction, and if I didn’t hit
exactly the right one
, Mrs. Bat would make a federal case out of it. She’d stand over my shoulder and harangue me about sharps and flats for an HOUR—and in those days a Saturday hour was the equivalent of 53 weekday hours—until finally she’d give up and go outside to catch moths for dinner.

In other words, I was not a natural piano student, in stark contrast to Mozart, a brilliant musical prodigy who by age nine had already composed his classic work
Porgy and Bess
. I did eventually take up the guitar, and I even played in a band in college, but we didn’t play complicated music. We played songs like “Land of 1,000 Dances,” which only has one chord, namely, “E.” In fact, a lot of our songs basically consisted of “E.” Usually we’d play “E” for an hour or so, then we’d take a fifteen-minute break, during which we’d change over to “A.”

So even though Lois Grant seemed to be a nice, sincere person, I frankly doubted that I had ever been Mozart, and I pretty much forgot about our correspondence until I received my copy of
Spirit at Work
and saw the chapter in there about me. I began to wonder: What if I really
was
the reincarnation of Mozart? I mean, I don’t want to get too spiritual here, but if Joya/Michael is correct—if I really am the embodiment of one of the greatest musical minds in history—then anytime anybody plays any Mozart music, I
should get royalties, right? So just to be on the safe side, if you use any of my songs—
The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, “
Summertime,” “Happy Birthday,” “Mony Mony,” etc.—I’
d
appreciate it if you’d send me a check. Make it out to Dave “Wolfgang” Barry.

A
while ago the
New York Times
printed an item concerning an eleven-year-old girl who was overheard on the streets of East Hampton, New York, telling her father, “Daddy, Daddy, please don’t sing!”

The daddy was Billy Joel.

The irony, of course, is that a lot of people would pay BIG money to hear Billy Joel sing. But of course these people are not Billy Joel’s adolescent offspring. To his adolescent offspring, Billy Joel apparently represents the same thing that all parents represent to their adolescent offspring: Bozo-Rama. To an adolescent, there is nothing in the world more embarrassing than a parent.

When I was an adolescent, my dad wore one of those Russian-style hats that were semi-popular with middle-aged guys for a while in the early sixties. You may remember this hat: It was shaped kind of like those paper hats that some fast-food workers have to wear, only it was covered with fur. Nobody—and I include both Mel Gibson and the late Cary Grant in this statement—could wear this hat and not look like a complete dork.

So naturally my dad wore one. The fur on his was dark and curly; it looked as though this hat had been made from
a poodle. My dad was the smartest, most decent, most perceptive person I’ve ever known, but he was a card-carrying member of the Fashion Club for Men Who Wear Bermuda Shorts with the Waist up Around Their Armpits, Not to Mention Sandals with Dark Socks.

My dad liked his Russian hat because he was bald and it kept him warm; he did not care what it looked like. But I cared
deeply
. I especially cared when I was waiting for my dad to pick me up outside Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School after canteen. Canteen was this school-sponsored youth activity designed to give us something to do on Friday nights other than vandalize mailboxes; we’d go to the school, and the boys would go to the gym to play basketball, while the girls went to the cafeteria to play “Please Mr. Postman” 700 consecutive times on the 45 rpm lo-fi record player and dance the Slop with each other. Eventually the boys would wander in from the gym, and the girls would put on slow, romantic songs such as “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” and the boys, feeling the first stirrings of what would one day grow and blossom into mature love, would pour soft drinks down each other’s pants.

After canteen we’d stand outside the school, surrounded by our peers, waiting for our parents to pick us up; when my dad pulled up, wearing his poodle hat and driving his Nash Metropolitan—a comically tiny vehicle resembling those cars outside supermarkets that go up and down when you put in a quarter, except the Metropolitan looked sillier and had a smaller motor—I was mortified. I might as well have been getting picked up by a flying saucer piloted by some bizarre multitentacled stalk-eyed slobber-mouthed alien being that had somehow got hold of a Russian hat. I was horrified at what my peers might think of my dad; it
never occurred to me that my peers didn’t even notice my dad, because they were too busy being mortified by
their
parents.

Of course eventually my father stopped being a hideous embarrassment to me, and I, grasping the Torch of Dorkhood, became a hideous embarrassment to my son—especially when, like Billy Joel, I try to sing. (I don’t mean that I try to sing like Billy Joel; I try to sing more like Aretha Franklin.) If you want to see a flagrant and spectacular violation of the known laws of physics, watch what my son does if we are in a public place and for some reason I need to burst into the opening notes of “Respect” (“WHAT you want! Baby I got it!”). When this happens, my son’s body will instantaneously disappear into another dimension and rematerialize as far as two football fields away. The results are even more dramatic with the song “Got My Mojo Workin’.”

Yes, parents: In the ongoing battle between you and your adolescent children, you possess the ultimate weapon—the Power to Embarrass. Use this power, parents! If your adolescent children are in ANY way displeasing you—if they are mouthing off or engaging in unacceptable behavior—do not waste your breath nagging them. Instead, simply do what Billy Joel and I do: sing. In fact, I think our judicial system should use this power to punish teenage criminal defendants:

Yes, if we were to impose this kind of justice, we’d see a dramatic drop in adolescent crime. The streets would be safer, the adults would be in charge again, and the nation would be a happier place. Just thinking about it makes me want to sing a joyful song. Come on! Everybody join in!

Hey! Where’d everybody go?

I
want to stress that I’m not bitter about what the Philip Morris Corporation is trying to do with the name “Dave.”

In case you didn’t know, Philip Morris is test-marketing a new brand of cigarettes called Dave’s. Over the past year I’ve seen big billboard advertisements for Dave’s cigarettes in Seattle and Denver. These are folksy ads; one of them features a tractor. The message is that Dave’s is a folksy brand of cigarette, produced by a down-to-earth, tractor-driving guy named Dave for ordinary people who work hard and make an honest living, at least until they start coughing up big folksy chunks of trachea.

Of course there is no actual Dave. The people at Philip Morris are just calling the new brand Dave’s because they think the name Dave sounds trustworthy and noncorporate. This is pretty funny when you consider that Philip Morris is the world’s largest tobacco company and has enough marketing experts and advertising consultants and lawyers and lobbyists to sink an aircraft carrier, not that I’m suggesting anything.