It's odd, the things that pop into a person's head.
I'm analyzing some data this afternoon. (Which probably will not make it into the paper and the presentation...they're not very good data, boo. And boo to the wildly fluctuating temperature in the room where I had to do the experiment - I think that's partly why they are not good data).
Anyway, one of the plants I am working with is Chamaecrista fasciculata. Better known as partridge-pea, but I abbreviated it CF for my own purposes.
And looking at the CFs I had written down in the notebook, I suddenly thought of Chicken Fat.
Does anyone else remember this? It was a record (I remember it as an old 45 that one of my homeroom teachers had). It was a little "fitness" song that involved toe-touches and other stuff (which today would probably be considered way too tame to whip the little fat kids into shape). I remember doing it a lot of mornings in early grade school, and I also seem to remember the teacher pulling the record out on rainy days at recess time.
Chicken Fat (warning: song will start to play. May not be so good if you're at work. Or if you have a psyche that's scarred by memories of such things being brought up)
the lyrics. Huh. Robert Preston ("Professor Harold Hill") sang it, and it was written by Meredith Wilson. (Odd that both also worked on "The Music Man" - at least the movie version. I wonder if the collaboration for the song came out of that?).
Apparently it was a big thing in the 1960s (the result of some JFK program), but I can aver that it was still being used - at least in my school system - in the early 70s. (And yes, it was the Robert Preston version.)
I hadn't thought about that in YEARS but now I cringe a bit at the memory of all of us kids doing toe-touches and push-ups in the classroom with its stained, nasty, indoor-outdoor carpeting (and SOME OF US in jumpers* and saddle shoes to do them, even). I don't know that I'm as horrified by the memory of it as some of the people commenting on the various sites. I certainly don't feel "scarred for life" or anything similar by it. But then again, I was a thin-to-average little kid (and I could whup the tails of most of the other girls in sit-ups at least; I was one of the few who did the 100-in-one-minute required by the President's Fitness test. I lost on the pull-ups, though; no upper body strength.)
(*UK folk: pinafore-dresses. Not pullover sweaters).
2 comments:
We didn't use "Chicken Fat" in our school, but I know the tune well: it was regularly requested on the Dr. Demento show in the late Seventies and early Eighties. (Which explains why it's in the Mad Music Archive, which started out as an index to Demented Discs.)
One of my favorite Preston moments was in the weird Blake Edwards film S.O.B. (This is the one in which Julie Andrews - Mrs Edwards - appears topless.) In this one, Preston is playing a physician of dubious repute, and at some Hollywood gathering, a finger-pointer points a finger at him and calls him a "shyster."
Preston is quick to object: "A shyster is a disreputable lawyer. I am a quack."
I remember doing calisthenics to "Chicken Fat" once in grade school gym, and even at age 6 I found it weird and insulting.
Whenever I see "CF" - even though these days it's almost always "childfree" - the first thing I think of is Cystic Fibrosis.
Stream of consciousness re Robert Preston (to Julie Andrews, in fact, in another movie): "There's nothing more useless than an aging queen with a head cold."
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