119. Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls

119. "Sirius/Eye in the Sky" by Alan Parsons Project

The Chicago Bulls pretty much ruined the song "Sirius" for all Jazz fans, but it is another one of those instrumental segue songs that make the following song even better, so I can't exclude it, even though it causes flashbacks of late 90s anguish.

There is no official video of the song that includes Sirius as a lead-in, so here's a live version featuring Alan Parsons singing with his old-man-singing-live voice, which is obviously not as smooth as the studio-enhanced voice we hear on the studio recording of the song. But to be fair to Alan, he wasn't the voice on the studio recording. It was his partner Eric Woolfson. Alan started out as a producer, not a singer. And he brought in lots of other people to sing on the songs, so he never really took the attitude of "I'm the best singer in the world, so listen to me dammit!" In fact, it was Woolfson, that gave it the name "Alan Parsons Project." Alan was supposed to be the engineer and producer on the records, and Eric was going to write the songs and be the lead musician in the "project." When the project first got started, they never toured. It was just studio work by Alan and Eric and all the other musicians they invited to join in on the songs. But now Alan is old and needs money, and Eric is off doing something else with his life with music theater, so Alan formed a touring band, and he's singing the songs, because that's what the audience expects.




Okay. Enough with the project trivia. There's a really good reason this song is on my list.

It was my first slow dance ever!

It was August around the time school started. Randy had come to live with us. A stake dance had been announced for all 16-year-olds and older, and I was told I needed to go and take Randy with me so that he could meet all of the nice Mormon girls and they could meet him. The dance was out in some sagebrush field in the lava rocks between Arimo and McCammon, which I thought was a ridiculous place for a dance, but since I wasn't on the planning committee, I didn't get to choose the place. Randy came to the dance reluctantly, but I was more reluctant to actually dance than he was. I had always avoided slow dancing at school or church dances I had gone to in the past, but I couldn't avoid it with this one. It was inevitable. I was going to have to slow dance with someone, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it, and I knew it. I was dreading the moment because I had no idea who was going to be the one to ask me, and I didn't have the guts to ask the girls I really wanted to slow dance with. And that's why I breathed a sigh of relief when "Eye in the Sky" started playing and Mary Barlow walked up to me. She didn't ask as much as just grab me by the hand and pull me to the dance area where we proceeded to slow dance for four-and-a-half minutes.

What was I thinking during that song while I was dancing with Mary? I was thinking about a previous time when Devon Maughan had, for reasons I don't know, stopped to pick up Mary Barlow and took her with us to go tubing down the Portnuef river at Lava Hot Springs. It was the only time I can remember that a girl joined us on those trips, and Mary seemed to always be trying to get her tube closer to mine. But I knew the river and could go wherever I wanted lickety-split, and she didn't, so I pretty much kept her at more than arms length. After ending our tubing at Lava, but before we took Mary home, we stopped at a swimming hole by the McCammon turnoff, which is about half a mile away from the dump. We all plunged into the hole, where I had had been swimming before, so I knew where to jump in and where I could swim to.

My favorite stunt was to swim out into the middle of this swimming hole, do a surface dive while someone was watching and then swim underneath this small waterfall nearby. I'd stay there where nobody could see me for a few minutes, and then I'd dive down and swim back out to the middle of the swimming hole and pretend like I'd been underwater the whole time. I don't remember if I was able to pull this joke on Mary at the time, but she somehow found out about the waterfall. And when I had swam underneath it this one time, Mary swam in to join me. I started to move away from the rock ledge I was holding onto like I was going to swim away. She then said, "Daren, don't you like me?"--because I was leaving as soon as she got there. I said, "Yeah, I like you," and then I dove underwater and swam away.

At the time of the waterfall encounter, I didn't know if she asked me that question because she wanted me to be her boyfriend or just what that was about. But while I was dancing with her to Eye in the Sky I reflected on that incident and thought, "You could have been slow dancing with her under the waterfall, you dipstick!" And after the dance I considered asking Mary out to see if we could ever make it back underneath that waterfall again. But she ended up getting a steady boyfriend, and I never pursued it any further. I figured she'd found the boy she liked, and I wasn't going to be able to convince her she'd have a better time with me.

I do have a few other good memories of Mary, mostly surrounding the Mz. Marsh Valley contest, which she produced, and some encounters in the hallway where I'd crack a joke and she'd laugh. The last time I saw Mary was at the Smith's grocery store in Logan when I was in graduate school. She worked there as a clerk, and I ran into her by the salad section. We exchanged niceties about what we were doing with our lives and what was going on with our families. Then she needed to get back to work, so I grabbed a bag of lettuce, said it was nice to see her again, we smiled at each other for a second, and then I walked away.

(Cue Dan Fogelberg "Same Old Lang Syne" song.)

And so now whenever I hear "Eye in the Sky," I think of Mary and how grateful I am that she was my first slow dance. If she could have read my mind during it, she might have found out the real reason I swam away from her at the swimming hole--I was afraid if I stayed there with her under that waterfall for any longer, I'd make a fool of myself by trying to make her my first kiss.