Paradise lost, epilogue
When I came home from the lamentable Meat Loaf concert, I reassured my wife that Mr. Loaf cannot sing and that he hadn’t performed the hallowed song from “Rocky Horror” — the song that she says she and our good friend from college sang every day, which I now don’t recall — anyway, and that the show was a bust. This was all true, and was also offered as assuagement.
Two mornings later, while she was still at work (she works nights), I found myself singing away in the kitchen while fixing breakfast. Evidently, I still know about 70% of the lyrics to Meat Loaf’s hit “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” much to the chagrin of my 17-year-old daughter who cut into my singing to ask in a demanding fashion, “Are you about done yet?” (Hey, it’s a long song.)
Just then, my wife swung around the corner into the kitchen and into view, startling me. “Glaah!” I shrieked. I hadn’t realized she was home from the hospital, but there she was in her death-toned black scrubs.
She had caught several bars of my rendition and offered this: “You’ve got the tempo wrong.” Whereupon she launched into the entire song, sung at pretty much the speed I’d thought I was doing.
As a playwright and as someone trained in analyzing the deeper motivations of characters real and fictive, I wondered at the intent behind this, and started to spin a whole narrative in my head. But as her husband, all I said was, “Trust me, it was a terrible concert. I spared you.”