Month: March 2026

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IT SHOULD BE LIKE A HALF AN HOUR VOLUME 20: In Praise of “Lola.”

I mean, to know me is to know I love The Kinks. I remember in high school a stoner girl in gym class said she was going to see The Kinks, and she was super excited. Even though I probably knew a lot of their songs back then, I don’t know that I knew them, The Kinks. I was pretty Beatle-centric in high school though, and more than a little grumpy that there wasn’t any Beatles tour planned.

The Kinks can be very Beatle-esque with some of their harmonies, and general vibe, but they also have more of an edge, and are funny. I mean, how can you not laugh at “Superman” or “I’m an Ape Man?” My favorite song might be “Waterloo Sunset,” or, frankly, “Lola.”

Lola is just an amazing song. I realized when quite young that the woman, Lola, was probably trans, though I doubt I knew what trans was as a thing, but I knew that some men felt like women. And frankly I didn’t know it could happen in reverse, though I have spent a lot of my own life feeling more masculine than feminine. I would not call myself trans, but I would say that I understand that gender is fluid, and probably freaking hormonal as well. Plus, we’ve spent centuries demonizing “female” traits as weak or unserious, so it’s easy to imagine women attempting to be taken seriously would feel more masculine, or masculine leaning, and how any man wanting to have an emotional life might be afraid of being called weak.

It’s funny, this song has been in my head since I awoke this morning, and then, when I went to look up the YouTube video, I saw that Moby doesn’t like it.

But there it is, an article in the Irish Times about it:

Click the photo above to go to the article.

I love this, from the article:

“Who the f**k is Moby?” Ray Davies, of The Kinks, said on hearing that the musician had taken issue with one of the band’s signature hits.

“He’s someone who does quite well,’ his brother, Dave, explained. “I don’t know anything about the guy.”

HA! I feel the same. I have little to no experience of Moby, and what I have heard has not interested me. My gosh, how grown is Moby? Does he not understand that “Lola” being released, getting played, and becoming incredibly popular, in 1970, was groundbreaking? Yes, it’s a little bit funny, but The Kinks are funny. Funny people are better than serious ones, just sayin’ Moby. Often first forays into things are imperfect, and not what we would want maybe in a modern view, but to deny that it took on a lot of taboos and normalized them, I mean the song never gets worried about masculinity or societal norms. “That’s the way that I want it to stay, and I always want to be that way for my Lola.” Doesn’t sound anti-trans to me.

I could listen to this all damn day.

Lola

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I Might Have a Secret, or, Bet You Bastards Are Sorry You’re Not Following Me Now….

Here’s me and my dad when I am about four months old:

Which, if the woman I am meeting over Zoom tomorrow is my sister, would have made her about four years old then.

I have a younger sister:

And tomorrow I might meet my older sister.

My dad was a bit of a man-about-town, which I knew probably from the time I was about …. ten? I mean, as much as you know that kind of stuff when you’re ten. If we count all the times I knew, from say age four, that my mother was borderline murderously angry at my father, then there could be an entire Brady Bunch out there.

We knew my father’s mother was Irish, my father’s father, Pearce, British, my mother’s mother Irish with a little Scottish mixed in, and my mother’s father, Italian. A cousin or someone had told my sister there was a little French in there, so she had done Ancestry, confirming, oui, French, which I think makes us official European mutts, and, yes, there seems to be a sister. I was (in my head) bemoaning not being able to say brother from another mother, because I love stupid things and rhymes, when I realized I could say, sister from the same mister. Which is a very weird thing for me to think of, I think, in the circumstances, while also being exactly like me to think of. And there you go.

I am an adoptive mom, so if I have a sister out there who wishes to know me, she certainly should get to. It does bring up a lot of thoughts because I spent my entire childhood as a daddy’s girl, and there was another little girl out there. Hmmmm…. Complicated father-feelings, right? Was my dad aware? Was he letting another little girl grow up without him? As an adult who knew him (who is different from the little girl who knew him) I can imagine he would have done whatever he felt complicated his life the least. I’m so sorry not to be able to think there is a more stellar version of him who I can present to his daughter.

Well, tomorrow, we’ll see.