“Don’t take candy from strangers.” For generations, parents have instructed their children to follow this critical directive at all times. At all times except Halloween, that is, when for a few precious hours, Mom and Dad’s message curiously becomes: “Here’s a bag; now go out and take as much candy from as many strangers as you possibly can.”
I certainly used to do my part every Halloween. Reviewing my substantial booty splayed out on the living room rug at the end of the evening, my first task was to discard any stray raisin boxes or apples that might have found their way into my bag. “You never know what some sicko might put into a piece of fruit,” was my solemn post-trick-or-treating motto.
Of course, candy was a different matter; I would have gladly eaten around a hypodermic needle sticking through the wrapper of a full sized Milky Way bar, blithely assuming the innovative folks at M&M Mars were just experimenting with “candy bar on a stick.”
While sifting through my haul, I always listened to an LP of Halloween-themed songs named for its title track, “Monster Mash.” Nowadays it’s hard to imagine a novelty song even making the charts, but back when it was released in 1962, “Monster Mash” was a huge hit. (Some even went so far as to say it was a “graveyard smash”).
Other “scary” songs on the record included “The Purple People Eater,” “Witch Doctor” and “Dinner With Drac.” After these tracks, however, the Halloween-themed novelty song pickings must have gotten a bit slim, which explains the inclusion of the less thanterrifying “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-dot Bikini.”
For readers unfamiliar with this tune, it describes a young woman’s fear of being seen at the beach in a skimpy bathing suit. Then again, maybe this song does carry a genuinely frightening message. Lord knows that nowadays, no teenage girl would ever want to be caught in public wearing a revealing outfit.
I mention all this in light of the recent death of Paul Van Valkenburgh, the man widely credited with writing “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-dot Bikini.” After his obituary appeared, however, it became clear that most of this “credit” came from Van Valkenburgh himself; for 40 years he had been telling everyone he wrote the song even though it was (in a strictly technical sense, mind you) written by someone else who is still alive. Whoops!
Now I’ve spun a fair number of lies in my lifetime, often revolving around whether I knew how fast I was driving, the identity of the person who “dealt it” and the claim that “this has never happened to me before.” But my lies were always about trying to make myself look better, or at least avoid blame for some alleged misconduct.
Not Van Valkenburgh. He chose to lie about penning a song so annoying that it was repeatedly played as a form of torture by the East German secret police in the 1962 film “One, Two, Three.” So my question is, if Van Valkenburgh was so eager to have people dislike him, what else was he falsely taking credit for — being the world’s number one Internet spammer, inventing the technology that makes car alarms sound all night long, and encouraging Kevin Federline to put out a rap album?
My point is that for Halloween it’s perfectly OK to wear a costume and pretend to be someone you’re not. But if you plan to take credit for something you had nothing to do with, at least choose something that people might have actually appreciated.
Except for “candy bar on a stick” —that one’s mine.
Examiner columnist Malcolm Fleschner in an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini? That should sure terrify them at this year’s Examiner’s office Halloween party.
