MARY LAMPHERE AUTHOR

For those of you who recognized ‘DREN’, you are my people. Old.

For those of you unfamiliar, let me catch you up–
A long, long, long, and even longer, time ago, there was a TV show called Happy Days. Now, I’m able to add that ‘even longer’ because although Happy Days aired from 1974 to 1984, it took place in the late 1950’s and early 60’s.

The word DREN comes up in an episode titled, They Call it Potsie Love, a riff on a popular song at the(ir) time, Puppy Love by Paul Anka. In the episode, during band rehearsal, 14 year old Joanie Cunningham is serenaded by her big brother Richie’s good friend, 17 year old Potsie Weber. Young Joanie becomes smitten. The Potsie character is kind of a dork, many call him a nerd. Joanie writes him a note, Dear Dren, which is nerd backwards because, to her, he’s the opposite of a nerd. I may be misremembering specifics, it has been a very long (that word again) time since I saw the episode, but the dren-nerd thing stayed with me.

I also mentioned “lilypadding” last week. Again, while I was considering topics for last mornings post, for whatever reason, I thought about nerds. Then I leapt to the idea that nerds today are not the same as the nerds that preceded them, they’re almost….cool now. And that thought spawned (a blog post and) an entire trip across many a lily padded mental pond.

I had the Happy Days board game. I must’ve received it as a gift because I remember laying on the floor playing with my cousins at Christmas. I remember the dress I was wearing. And the stupid tights. And the cookies we snacked on while we played.

“Parker Brothers brought out its Happy Days board game in 1976. Players compete to win degrees of “coolness” and score points on a jukebox-shaped scoreboard.” Which is kind of ironic considering what was considered “cool” then.

I looked up “dren” and Happy Days for last week’s post and the episode title had my mind hopping to the version of the song Puppy Love that I knew as a kid, which was by Donny Osmond, known for teenage love songs and purple socks. My friend in second grade had a poster of Donny Osmond on her bedroom wall, complete with exposed purple ankles, but I thought Tony DeFranco of The DeFranco Family was much cuter. I don’t believe I had a poster of Tony DeFranco on my wall, but I would listen to Heartbeat – It’s a Love Beat over Puppy Love every time. Heck, I’m listening now. (click the title and you can, too!)

So, from Heartbeat I hopped to Rock On by David Essex which had me leaping to the song Run Joey Run by David Geddes, which reminded me of the time my uncle and I spent months lip-syncing to that song with dreams of competing on The Gong Show. Then I immediately wondered why the girl in that song gets no credit and I thought, well, that’s not fair, I mean (spoiler) Julie gets shot for goodness sake, she should be credited. From there I leapt to thinking about my fourth grade best friend whose name was Julie and that time we helped set up for the Conklin Fun Fair and I lost my super ball. I loved a super ball.

Et voilà. You have a perfect microcosm of lilypadding…Nerds are cool now, hop hop hop, I miss my bouncy ball. I’ll stop there, but trust me when I say, I’ve leapt to a dozen new pads (per thought!) while writing this.

Now that you are up close and personal with my thought process, I hope you will recognize and respect the effort that goes into my weekly editing.

It’s a miracle I get anything accomplished.