Looking back on things now, it would seem that my Aunts Vernita and Patty (my mom’s younger sisters) were somewhat wild, but to me they were just fun. They took me to scary movies, brought me to bars for ginger ales, made the butteriest popcorn imaginable when they babysat, held cigarette-smoking rituals with me and my sister (yes, things were different back then and no, they didn’t force us to inhale) and taught us lots of words we had never heard before. There will be plenty of stories about them simply because every time we saw them there was sure to be an adventure.
Patty and Vernita had to be the coolest girls north of Albany, and I was lucky enough to be on their good side. Whenever I went to the farm where they lived they would take me into their rooms and play me their records. Vernita was a rocker, and she played her 45s really loud and danced around while we listened. My favorite of all the songs she had was the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”, which (for a year or two anyway) I only heard in that room. Patty was a rocker as well, but a little more cerebral in her tastes and would play me records according to themes. She seemed to have an awful lot of songs that mentioned September.
My aunts eventually found guys, got married and took their records with them, so I no longer had them to go to for my extra credit music instruction, but every once in a while Vernita would come to my house to visit and I would take her to my room and play her MY records. Every relationship has its sets of turning points, and one of ours came the day that I played her the new Kinks record I had just gotten. I brought her into my room, told her to close her eyes so that she couldn’t see who it was and I put on “20th Century Man”. Never particularly patient, she opened her eyes a few bars in and said “Well when is it going to start?” Even after the song got going, it was pretty obvious that she was never going to like it. No 1964 Kink-crunch, no hell-bent guitar solo, no dancing, no fun. I’m sure that night she went home and listened to “You Really Got Me” just to get the taste out of her mouth and I probably listened to “Have a Cuppa Tea”. I had moved on, the Kinks had moved on, but Vernita had refused to budge, and an important part of my musical and social education was at that point complete.
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