The Music of Your Life Read Online Free PDF

a little disappointing; you can’t quite imagine that “Long John” would be a selection on the Welk show, or that this would be the type of number you would be asked to do at celebrity-drenched parties in Beverly Hills or at the Rainbow Room. Still, you accept the task with gratitude, and it does genuinely excite you to think about performing a solo in front of an audience.
    But already you hear some of the boys in the class start to snicker and jeer about your being selected to sing a solo—even Eric—and you realize, or should have realized, that it was only a matter of time before he would move on, what with his firsthand accounts of big-league baseball games and his burgeoning athletic ability. But it doesn’t matter, you tell yourself; he couldn’t remember the names of Broadway shows anyway.

    Your grandmother, whose name is Agnes but whom everyone calls Perky, spends more time visiting your house now that she and Grandpa Joe have split up for good, but she doesn’t seem sad or moody, as you expected her to be. Instead, she seems her typically happy, upbeat, good-time-gal self, living up to her nickname, bedecked, as always, in diamond rings and rhinestone bracelets, with upswept, beehivey blond-gray hair and jewel-encrusted cat-eye glasses, as though she is always on her way from the beauty parlor or the country club. Often, she is.
    â€œHello, dah’lin,” she rasps, kissing you on the lips (something Connie will never do), and blowing big smoky puffs of her Virginia Slim, bracelets jangling and sliding up and down her arms. This fall, Perky has indulged wholeheartedly in the current fashion trend of paper dresses. She features many different styles: a big white one with a red geranium pattern, a purple short one with yellow polka dots, a hot orange above-the-knee number. Connie has said be careful when you hug Perky that you don’t tear her dress or go near her with a Popsicle because paper won’t hold up in the washing machine. (Ray: “Connie, if you ever start wearing paper dresses, I’m leaving out the back door. I swear. Stupidest damn thing I ever heard of.”)
    One evening, as you and Perky sit side by side on the love seat in the family room, she tells you: “Dah’lin, the Capitol Department Store wants me to model my paper dresses for a photo spread in the newspapah. Isn’t that wuunduhfulll? At my age?”
    You agree with her that it is wonderful, wunnerful, wunnerful, and you’re thrilled that your classmates, and especially Miss Kenan, will see what a mod, trendsetting grandmother you have. You and Perky sit together and thumb through new issues of her movie magazines, which she has brought over just for you to see, since Ray won’t allow Connie to buy them for you directly.
    â€œWhich movie star hairdo do you think I should get for myself, dah’lin?” she asks, as you flip the pages.
    â€œLike Elizabeth Taylor,” you say, fixating on a page with the headline: Liz and Dick: The Jig Is Finally Up. “Or like this,” you say, pointing to a raven-haired Natalie Wood, posing coquettishly in a “Toni Girl” flip, a publicity still from one of her old movies, Sex and the Single Girl.
    â€œ Sex and the Single Girl , oh my goodness,” says Perky. “Well, dah’lin, that’s what I am now, a single gal.”
    â€œHey, Mother, why don’t you take him out to the yard and throw baseballs with him?” Ray bellows from his tilt-back relaxation chair. “That’s what he needs.”
    You look down quickly, pretending not to hear him. You know he’s right; you probably should be trying to get the hang of throwing and catching instead of feeding eagerly on tales of Hollywood. You pretend to be engrossed in an article about how Doris Day’s last husband has squandered all her money and left her penniless. The caption reads: America’s Sweetheart Turns Beggar Woman