CRS is sometimes a painful thing. Today I lost one of the Muppets. The bear who tells (mostly) lame jokes--you know the one. And I know him, too. But could not for the life of me come up with his name. I'm not sure why my mind came around to even thinking about the Muppets, but there it was, while the bears' name wasn't. I could remember Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Bunsen and Beaker...even Fred, Kermit's nephew. In racking my brain I also cross-referenced Sesame Street characters; Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, the Count (whose one job is to count things...one, that is ONE job...), Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch. Oscar has always been my favorite. He and Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Woods make one heckuva pair of realists for cartoon/children's characters. "Always with the negative waves, Moriarity, always with the negative waves...". Bonus points if you can come up with the movie that quote came from.
See? Odd little things clatter around in my head. Bits and pieces. Riff and raff. And Rolf. But not a lowly joke-telling bear-puppet. I know why, too. No grandkids. Yep, it's all my grown children's fault, not delivering any progeny, thus refreshing my memory banks with streams of childhood characters to keep up with. Harumph! Perhaps in time...
So I went on with my day; took a shower, (which sometimes clears up a stubbornly blocked memory--maybe I have a dirty mind? Alas, it did not do the trick this time.) checked on the cats, folded some clothes and did other laundry chores since I was in the basement anyway. As I was thinking of a song--no, no idea why this one came into my head, either--the name of the bear came back to me. Fozzie Bear. Why on earth was that so hard to come up with? And what about that song suddenly brought it back? ..."And we danced, like a wave on the ocean, romanced...we were liars in love and we danced..." A song by the Hooters from the 80's, I think. Nothing to tie it into a fuzzy, rather ugly puppet with a hat who tells silly jokes. Not even a song about laundry, which I was doing and about which the songs I most mis-remember have a theme of. That's called a 'mondegreen', by the way. Mishearing or mis-remembering a song lyric.
I bet you're thinking there can't be two songs about laundry. Ha, there is so! "Dirty Laundry" by Don Henley, about which I always come up with the line, "Stick your fingers in your ears, you've got dirty laundry". No, that is definitely not one of Mr. Henley's song lyrics. But that line comes up whenever I think of that song anyhow. The other laundry song? An old Mathew Wilder song called "Break My Stride". It contains the lines: "Last night I had the strangest dream...I sailed away to China...In a little row boat to find ya...And you said you had to get your laundry cleaned". See? But I don't mis-remember that part. It's the chorus that gets me (probably because I never remember the title of this song...I had to Google...the modern version of the Funk and Wagnell's...Dan Rowan and Dick Martin would be proud...) confused. My version is "Ain't nothin' gonna break-a my spine...ain't nothin' gonna slow me down...oh no, I got to keep on movin'... Of course the reality is "Ain't nothin' gonna break-a my STRIDE...." There might be something Freudian in that one since my back likes to go out without me.
But now all is as it should be. Memory blank filled...for awhile. Welcome back, Fozz E. Bear.
