EARWORM DE JOUR

Don't worry, this is not gonna be a daily blurb. It's just that every day I get a song stuck in my head. I'm sure a lot of us do. And it could be just about anything from the 30 second blurb that happens while Jeopardy contestants are figuring out their final Jeopardy answers to Hoagy Carmichael playing As Time Goes By in Casablanca. Today's Earworm de Jour for me is Danke Schoen by Wayne Newton. I hated that song when I was a kid and I hate the idea that it, for whatever strange reason, crept into my head and nested there this morning. 

I remember seeing Wayne on the Ed Sullivan show way back in the day and thinking, wow, people actually like this smarmy shit? He made a whole career with many years in Las Vegas with that song as the centerpiece of it all. Imagine that. There's no accounting for taste, I guess.

There were a lot of singers like Wayne Newton back then. They appealed to the older crowd, which in the 60s would have been people like my dad, who was really more of a Sinatra guy himself. Anyway, most of us get one free Earworm every day. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? When I found out my friend Shelley Brown was moving back to Chicago, I woke up the next morning with old Blue eyes singin' about it in my head. Maybe we just do this to ourselves and aren't even conscious of it. No matter what, I'll be happy when old Wayne ships out of my brain.