Twas Brillig

Hey, everyone!  Brillig here.  Welcome to our guest-blogging-ness!  I’m so excited to have my friends, both old and new, both “real life” and “online,” posting here at my place while I try to get my head screwed back on.  Guest-blogs will be posted in the order that people signed up in (if you offered to guest-post and you did NOT receive an email from me, PLEASE let me know!) and with that I’m excited to welcome our first guest-blogger, my dear Kate—my best friend of more than a decade and the girl who got me into blogging in the first place.  And wouldn’t you just know it, but Kate has chosen to post about my very favorite topic—ME!  Hahaha.  And so, without further ado….

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Hello there, Brilligites.  I’m sure most of you have heard of me before, being that I’m totally awesome AND Brillig’s real life BFF.  If you haven’t, allow me to introduce myself.  I’m Kate from Walking Kateastrophe . . . and you all have me to thank for the blogger that is Brillig.  Haha.  Told you I was awesome.

You learn a lot about a person over the course of fourteen years as best friends.  You learn about their favorite foods¹ , their hated foods², their sleeping habits³, their favorite snacks⁴, their favorite movies⁵, favorite TV shows⁶, their taste in men⁷, and most especially their favorite music.

Brillig is obsessed with music in a way I have rarely seen amongst mere mortals.  My first trip to her bedroom left me speechless (SPEECHLESS I tell you) at her vast collection of vinyl records.  She knows almost every piece of music from Wagner to Enrique Iglesias to The Offspring.  She has EVERY SINGLE WORD of EVERY SINGLE Duran Duran song completely memorized.  Oh, and she is an amazing opera singer as well as being able to sing tenor.  You heard me.  TENOR. 

Music and Brillig go hand in hand.  She used to spend HOURS and HOURS making me summer mix tapes to get us through our long summers apart in high school (we both traveled with our families during the summer so we were always apart).  I know I have those tapes somewhere, and I should really pull them out and preserve the amazing mixes.  They got me through some tough times and some great times. 

SO, what I thought I’d do, for fun, is give you a list of songs that remind me of Brillig.  And maybe a little description of why or how they remind me of Brillig . . . because I can!  This list could be ten miles long, but I’m just going to hit the (in my opinion) top ten high points in no particular order, except maybe the last two, which I think are the best.

• Ding Dong the Witch is Dead (Wizard of Oz):  Our friendship was forged during a high school performance of The Wizard of Oz in which Brillig was the Wicked Witch of the West.  I was Aunt Em . . . we had fun.  Probably a little too much fun.
• Copacabana (Barry Manilow):  When we were roomies, we had a Beta.  Her name was Lola.  She was a showfish. We later learned all pretty Betas are male, so we then had a transvestite showfish named Lola.  Good times.
• You Surround Me (Erasure):  Not necessarily Erasure’s best known song in the US, but ha-cha-cha it’s a fun listen!!   Brillig can sing even the lowest notes.  It’s very sexy (both the song and her singing bass).
• And So It Goes (Billy Joel):  Brillig sang this song in high school choir her senior year and we both fell madly in love with it because of the message about loving after being hurt.  We were both pissed when Carmen slaughtered it on American Idol Season 2’s “Billy Joel Night” (and both predicted she’d pick it) but continue to love it.  The King’s Singers version might be our favorite.
• Der Holle Rache (Die Zauberflote, Mozart): It’s Brillig we’re talking about here, so I can’t say “Queen of the Night Aria from The Magic Flute by Mozart.”  I have to go all German on you.  She gets a little snobby about her Mozart being in German.   Pretty much ANYTHING Mozart reminds me of Brill, but especially Die Zauberflote and the movie Amadeus.  In the movie, where they put this song is one of my favorite parts, therefore you put together the movie, the music and the composer and they all point the way toward Brillig.
• Sowing the Seeds of Love (Tears for Fears):  We’d sit on the two beds in her bedroom, listening to this song.  We’d imitate the trumpet in the bridge, we’d dance and laugh and sing along and then collapse, exhausted.  I think it’s one of my favorite memories with Brilly.
• Pure (Lightening Seeds):  I never ever skip over this song when it pops up on my iPod.  It reminds me of a spring break trip we took to California, laying by the pool, stupidly wishing we were skinnier.  Brillig created harmonies for the chorus and we’d play the song on repeat, singing at the tops of our lungs.
• Only You (Yaz):  I once listed this as a song I never skip, and I still don’t.  Neither does Brillig, I do believe.  We both love the Enrique version (both the all Spanish AND half-Spanish versions) and BOTH Yaz versions.  I am of the strong opinion that this song is not long enough.
• Ordinary World (Duran Duran):  Brillig sites this as ““the pinnacle of modern music”” and I tend to agree with her.  Duran Duran will forever remind me of Brillig and make me love her even more.
• Needs (Collective Soul):  If you haven’t heard this song, you MUST listen.  It’s amazing.  Let me give you a sampling of the lyrics to prove it to you:

All around me I see what weakness has made
Too much tomorrow I think I’ll take all today

I don’t need nobody
I don’t need the weight of words to find a way
To crash on through
I don’t need nobody
I just need to learn the depth
Or doubt of faith to fall into

In this time of substitute
It’s my needs I’ve answered to (All the while)
And the hope that I invest
Still turns to signals of distress (All the while)

So he spends the whole song claiming he doesn’t need anyone or anything . . . and then, he gets it.  He realizes the truth, and the music swells and the climax of the song makes it even more amazing:

You’re all I need
When the water runs deep
You’re all I need
Now I cry my soul to sleep
You’re all I need

Seriously, it’s so amazing.  Did I say that already?  Hmm, let me repeat.  AMAZING.  And also where I’m going to end this list because I think it’s one of the very best.

I could literally go on for months here.  There are SO MANY MORE!  Elvis, The Beatles, Depeche Mode, The Offspring (‘cause she’s pretty fly, for a white guy) . . .  If you don’t have these songs, you should.  If you do have them, you should give them another listen and just revel in their awesomeness.

This list is mostly made up of eighties songs because I’m pretty sure Brillig feels she was born about a decade late when it comes to music.  For the record, she is also pretty up to date with current music, witnessed by the fact that her son (and probably all of her children) can sing every word of every All American Rejects song, and I’m sure can still kick my butt at any pop music trivia game anyone could throw our way.  I’m sure she can also sing every Wiggles song, because she’s a rad Mom like that.

Like sands in an hourglass, these are the soundtracks of our life as best friends and I fully plan on continuing to add songs for decades to come.