North Country Girl: Chapter 32 — Bamboozled at East High
For more about Gay Haubner’s life in the North Country, read the other chapters in her serialized memoir. The Post will publish a new segment each week.
As if we were still in elementary school, we teenagers delighted in anything that was a disruption in the school day. One poor kid, not the brightest light in the harbor, made a series of phone calls to the East office, claiming he had placed a bomb in the school, freeing the rest of us outdoors into the grey chill of a Duluth spring, no time to fetch coats or mittens from our lockers. Standing where somebody decided was a safe enough distance from a bomb, we kept warm by huddling in our little cliques, reveling over being sprung from chemistry or French II or metal shop.
Since the fake-bomb-threat miscreant had been spotted at the school’s one and only pay phone immediately before each evacuation, we all knew who he was, but our lips were sealed. The last time he called in a bomb threat, he must have been unhinged by the many thumbs up shot his way by passing students; he stuttered out to the school secretary, “And this isn’t (miscreant’s name)!” We never saw him after that.
Assemblies also broke up the school day; unlike the thunderous pep rallies held in the acoustically challenged gym, during assemblies you could have a whispered gossip or flirtation with the person next to you or even go to sleep.
One morning the crackly voice of Mr. Srdar, the principal, came over the ancient mesh loudspeakers mounted in every classroom. “Attention students: There will be a special assembly at ten o’clock tomorrow. All students are required to attend.” Rumors flew: was a friendly policeman in uniform coming to talk to us about drugs? Did they finally figure out which teacher was sleeping with his students? The worst scenario was yet another visit from Junior Achievement, touting the virtues of capitalism and on the prowl for future Titans of Industry. If that were the case, at least we could all catch an hour nap.
The next day we trooped into East’s auditorium and reverted to rowdy eight-year-olds; the big room rang with shouts, laughter, and whistles. The principal shushed us down into a quiet roar, and we jostled for seats, seats whose wooden bottoms had been worn so slick and shiny by generations of teenage bottoms that if you slumped or fell asleep you were in danger of sliding to the floor.
Mr. Srdar stood at the podium someone had thoughtfully placed on the left side, where it caught the watery spring light. He introduced the day’s special guest, who would speak to us about the famine in Africa.
This was unexpected and shut us up. We looked from side to side, acknowledging that every single one of us, even kids who couldn’t find the world’s second largest continent on a globe, had been implored to “Think of the starving children in Africa” when staring down a plate of grey meatloaf, calf’s’ liver, or boiled-to-death broccoli, which was supposed to make the disgusting mess more appetizing.
An earnest young man in khakis stepped up to the podium, introduced himself, and spoke about the war in Biafra, waving around a copy of National Geographic. He described the starving children he had seen, their stomachs bloated, their eyes dull. He said when the children’s hair turned red it was a sign that they were dying. Their bodies were not taking in enough nutrients to create the dark hair pigment: a little red-haired African child was a walking corpse.
He was good, so good that no one questioned why he had no photos, only a copy of a magazine, or why, if he was just back from Africa, he was as pale as any Minnesotan in March.
When he made a little choking noise in his throat, and dropped his head, girls all around me started to weep, searching in their bags for Kleenex to blot their tears and blow their noses. Even a few of the boys were squirming and blinking. This went on for a while, the young man droning on with his dramatic descriptions of dying kids and keening mothers. I wondered what the hell is going on here?
Then came the pitch. This nice young man was raising money for the starving children of Africa (no, we still couldn’t just send them our spinach and fish sticks) through a brand new kind of fund-raiser: a Walk-A-Thon, a 20-mile trek through Duluth. To participate, we had to ask our parents, parents’ friends, aunts, uncles, grandparents, any available adult with money in pocket, to sponsor us at so much a mile — preferably a dollar.
He said, “Imagine you’re holding a little African in your arms. Imagine that baby’s scrawny limbs, the distended belly barely covered in rags, the head that seems too large topped with a scruff of tightly curled, rust-colored hair. That baby is looking at you with big brown eyes, pleading for help. If you do not participate in the Save Africa Walk-a-Thon, you are dumping this poor dying baby out of your lap and letting that baby die.“
Even the football players were sniffing now, and some girls were red-faced from bawling. Mr. Srdar dabbed his own wet eyes with a big white hankie, congratulated the young man on the noble work he was doing, and assured him that he could count on East High students.
The Walk-A-Thon was scheduled for that Saturday. We were told the meeting place and instructed to bring our sponsors’ money with us. We were not given sign-up sheets, collection envelopes, buttons, pamphlets, or t-shirts. None of us thought this was odd as we went about pestering parents, family friends, and relatives for money.
I knew better than to ask my own mom, certain what her response would be to giving away money to perfect strangers. My dad and one set of grandparents were Missing In Action, the other grandparents hundreds of miles away. I walked over to Lakeview Avenue, my old block, and knocked on the McCauleys’ door; they were an older couple who were always good for a couple of boxes of Thin Mints or Samoa Girl Scout cookies. I was not nearly as eloquent as the young man and had a hard time explaining why Mrs. McCauley should give me the immense sum of twenty dollars so I could go on a walk. She pulled a crumpled one from a change purse, I took it, thanked her, and headed over to Michael Vlasdic’s house.
Michael was not walking. He had no interest in any extracurricular activities besides listening to records, taking drugs, and screwing me. Always a good sport, Mrs. Vlasdic gave me a twenty and told me I was a gutes Maedchen.
On a bright spring morning, a sympathetic mother delivered me and a passel of my friends to the Walk-a-Thon starting point, where the young man stood with a clipboard, writing down kids’ names, taking their money, handing out blurry mimeographed maps, and thanking us for saving all those babies’ lives.
We were somewhere in West Duluth, a neighborhood I hadn’t been in for years, and then only to visit the small and smelly Duluth Zoo, where an irate, aggressive and way too close squirrel monkey had once tried to snatch my mom’s beehive hairdo off her head. As I squinted at the blurry map, trying to make sense out of all the random rights and lefts, the young man blew a whistle and we headed off en masse.
The first five miles weren’t so bad, we were with our friends, we were outside in the fresh sun of spring, joking and laughing, and extremely proud of ourselves. We were the better angels, the generation that was going to save the world. The next month, on April 22, a bunch of us do-gooders would be down on Park Point beach, celebrating the first Earth Day, saving the planet by creating rickety sculptures of driftwood while tripping on LSD.
By mile 10, there was no more laughter, only silent plodding. We wore flimsy sneakers and carried nothing; running shoes, bottled water, and energy bars had yet to be invented. I don’t know if anyone made it past the fifteen-mile mark. At that point I hobbled home, fell on the couch, and gingerly took off my Keds and ankle socks to reveal swollen, throbbing, blister-covered feet, while my mom yelled at me for being gone all day without calling.
What hurt even worse was finding out that our nice young man was not saving babies, but lining his own pockets. Too late Mr. Srdar got a phone call from a high school in St. Cloud, telling him to be on the lookout for a traveling flimflam man, who like Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, went from one innocent small town to the next, selling us nothing, not even big trombones or ratatat drums.
Even though I had watched Michael Vlasdic tear up during that hornswoggle of a speech, now he was miffed that I had given away his mom’s twenty dollars, which would have bought four hits of acid.
Since my father had left, my own cash flow had trickled down to nothing. My mom did not have a bank account in her name. It took several phone calls and several weeks before my dad would reluctantly show up to place some actual cash in my mom’s hand. She would then, almost as reluctantly, peel off a few bills for me. From that pittance I had to pay for my share of gas and booze on Friday nights with my pals, and for the drugs Michael and I took on Saturday.
But suddenly it was summer, school was out, and I was sixteen, old enough to find a job. The Flamette, a diner that was swarmed with tourists in the summer, hired high school girls. My friends Nancy, Betsy, and Debbie waitressed there, I looked on, jaw agape, as they competitively counted up their tips after work. I filled out a Flamette application, leaving the “Experience” section blank, and was shown the door.
I next applied to be an A&W carhop; the manager took one look at my scrawny arms and knew that I would immediately dump a tray laden with those heavy glass mugs of root beer and ice cream over myself or a customer.
I lowered my sights to restaurant kitchen work. When we were still a family, my father had spent enough money at the Bellows Steak House that the manager recognized me as I sat in the waiting area on a June afternoon, clutching my application form. He hired me as a salad girl. I would work four nights a week and make $1.90 an hour.
My work night started at four o’clock. My primary duty was preparing the mix for the big salad that came with every dinner and that was ninety percent iceberg lettuce. In the basement prep kitchen I’d give each head of lettuce a good thunk on the bottom and twist out the core as instructed by the scary chef. He had also shown me how to operate the electric lettuce shredder without losing a finger, but I was too terrified of that whirling, deadly contraption to put a hand anywhere near it. Instead I stood across the room and tossed heads of lettuce towards the blades, again and again, gathering the bits that went all over the floor and adding them to the giant plastic salad bin.
I assembled salad after salad so that they could be delivered, cold and crisp, to diners who would smother them with French, Thousand Island, or Roquefort. It was my job to keep the tripart salad dressing servers filled; I never washed those servers, just gave them a quick wipe with a kitchen rag to clean off the crust along the sides of the silvery cups and the top of the ladles.
My other task was making shrimp cocktails, and boy, Duluthians loved their shrimp cocktails. After the eight hundred salads were made and chilling, I pulled a huge bag of shrimp out of the freezer and dunked it in a sink filled with lukewarm water. I spent the next hour peeling and deveining shrimp, stopping to pull out salads for early bird diners and hoping that they wouldn’t order the shrimp cocktail as basically they would get shrimp-flavored ice cubes.
The nadir of my night was when some brave or deluded soul ordered a platter of oysters or clams on the half shell. While unordered shrimp ended up in the next night’s scampi, the restaurant had no use for leftover bivalves, so I could not defrost them in advance. I had to struggle with each frozen shell, holding it under running water, attacking it with an oyster knife, and cutting my own hands to pieces. Then I had to slice a lemon.
Finally, towards the end of the night, with a few hateful customers lingering in the dining room trying to decide if they should have one more Grasshopper or Golden Cadillac or Brandy Alexander, the kitchen would quiet and slow. The cooks scraped black squares of pumice up and down the grill while the waitresses snuck back to my little area to grab a forbidden smoke. I was in awe of these creatures, with their elaborate updos, kabuki eyebrows and eyeliner, and pockets bursting with ones. They paid me no attention at all, I was a mere salad girl, covered in shreds of lettuce and smelling of shrimp.
Every week I cashed my paycheck at the Bellow’s and immediately set out to buy drugs, a task that pathologically shy Michael Vlasdic had relegated to me. Even with my onerous work schedule, the freedom of summer meant that Michael and I could trip several times a week. There were kids from East High who could be counted on to have acid, my old admirer Stan now one of them. I could call John Bean; although I was always afraid that he would bring along Doug Figge, he never did. If no one I knew had LSD, I took the bus downtown to the scary, sinister pool hall, where the greasers from Central and Denfeld High hung out, a place that was so forbidden to a nice East High girl that it went unmentioned.
Fortunately, I never had to actually go into that dimly lit den of perdition. I’d poke my head in the doorway, and some long-haired guy in a white tee would nod, follow me out, and lead me to the back alley.
I hated buying drugs at the pool hall, convinced that I was going to be raped, robbed, and murdered by one of the dodgy seventeen-or eighteen-year-old dealers. I pleaded with Michael, “I’ll give you the money, but please, can you go make the buy?” Michael blanched at the idea of talking to a stranger, even one who sold drugs; but I was tired of risking my life. He reluctantly took my money and I felt like the worst girlfriend in the world.
That evening I let myself into the Vlasdic’s house. Michael was lying on the living room floor, staring at the ceiling. I shook him, “Michael. You bought acid right?” He nodded. “Ah, can I have mine?” He shook his head, pointed at his open mouth, and closed his eyes. I disgustedly left him there to trip on his own, went back home straight as a stone, and kept control of the money and the drugs from then on.
A Father Remembered: The Acting Coach
Theater was my father’s religion, and Shakespeare’s works were his Bible. Using Hamlet or Othello or King Lear as a moral compass, Dad set me up with some precise ideas about how a person should behave in the world.
As a young man, my father studied at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He came to New York at the height of the Depression, but within months he landed parts in daytime radio serials such as Myrt and Marge, Valiant Lady, and The Goldbergs. He was sometimes doing two or three live performances in a day, zipping across town from one studio to the next in taxis.
His dream was to perform on Broadway, and he would brim with emotion as he described the great stage actors he’d seen, such as the Lunts and a young Olivier. As for his radio work, that was just something he had to do to pay the bills.
By the time I was born, he had exited show business for a more stable career, but, as far as we kids knew, that was just a technicality. He would always be an actor at heart. Where other dads might sing in the shower, ours would recite from Hamlet. “What is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?” he would declaim in his stage voice — big enough to carry to the cheap seats, but in this case echoing through our New York apartment and, if the bathroom window was open, into the courtyard as well. He was bigger than life.
At a young age, I decided that I, too, would become an actor. My first big performance was in a school play. Our fifth-grade class had spent the whole semester studying the ancient Greeks. We had read young-adult versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and now we were performing an adaptation of an Aristophanes play, in which a farmer travels to heaven astride a giant dung beetle to discuss the follies of war with, well, you know, the big guy, Zeus. I was the leader of the chorus, and one day during rehearsal I slipped and fell. Amazingly, this got a big laugh.
We performed the play for the entire school — parents, too. I mugged my way through my scenes and, for my big finale, I upended myself spectacularly to roars of laughter. I was hilarious!
Mom came backstage to give me a hug, but Dad had left the theater early. It wasn’t until I got home that I had any inkling there was a problem. Still aglow from my smashing success, I rushed into the living room, only to find him seated in his chair, wearing his reading glasses and holding a large volume on his lap. He didn’t look up when I came in. A frown creased his forehead.
“Sit down,” he ordered, beckoning me to a second chair he had pulled up beside him. Seems I had violated just about every code of conduct in the actor’s book, from scene stealing to shameless overacting. He opened up The Complete Works of Shakespeare and turned to Hamlet’s advice to the players, Shakespeare’s master class on the actor’s craft.
He began reading: “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. … O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters. … I would have such a fellow whipped.”
This, my friends, is the short version. The soliloquy actually goes on a bit. He read me the whole thing. Then he had me read it — the equivalent in our house of being taken to the woodshed. Finally he let me go.
I was deflated, but it was a lesson that would stick with me, and, as I would realize in later years, Shakespeare’s words apply not just to the stage, but to life. In short: Be funny, but don’t be a clown; be smart, but don’t be a smart aleck.
I can’t say I’ve always followed this wise counsel, but when I feel the urge to show off, Hamlet’s advice to the players is always right there on my bookshelf.
Steven Slon is the Post’s editorial director. Follow him on Twitter.
This article is featured in the May/June 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
Being in Love
In 1930s, humorist J.P. McEvoy wrote the Post column “Father Meets Son” presented to readers in the form of letters filled with advice for navigating life’s rocky road. Employing a mix of wry humor and tough love, Dad doled out life lessons on everything from work to women. Readers loved it.
His son’s relationship with the boss’s daughter is getting serious! Dad encourages his son to talk to the boss about turning him into a father-in-law — but to find the emergency exit first.
Father Meets Son: Being in Love
By J.P. McEvoy
Originally published on June 5, 1937
Dear Son: So you love the boss’s daughter and the boss’s daughter loves you, and where do you go from there? She wants you to go right to the boss and tell him the good news. You are not so sure he will think it is so good. And a lot of other things are worrying you. You have no money, no prospects, and the only job you have is driving the family car — her family. What will the old man say when he learns the family chauffeur wants to marry his daughter? And if he says, “Okay!” won’t people say you married for money, or just to get ahead? Quite a situation, but hardly a novel one. The movies would go out of business without it.
Suppose we sit down together and go over the situation bit by bit, like a couple of inchworms. First, there is this marriage question in general. Boss’s daughter or no boss’s daughter, should you get married at your age and in your economic spot? You are 23, you have no money saved up, you have a college education and a liberal arts diploma, you have had a few months’ experience at making your own living, you are ambitious, healthy, moderately good-looking, and in love. Not an impressive capital with which to start a business as difficult as marriage, unless you plan to put “good will” in at a handsome figure. Which has been done, and many times with great success. The girl is young and beautiful and spoiled, and her father is rich, and she is in love with you. It would take a smarter man than I am to analyze that statement and give you a trustworthy picture of the assets and liabilities in it. As a business proposition, the partnership you propose is not necessarily doomed to succeed. Neither is it bound to fail. A number of factors that do not appear on the balance sheet will decide the issue. Let us take them up, not necessarily in the order of their importance, because we don’t know what that order is.
You. Are you too young? You will have to find that out for yourself. Some boys are men at 18; some men are boys at 80. Do you want to grow up? Do you want to mature? Then you certainly are not too young to start. Holding a job matured you a little, but holding a wife will mature you a lot. If for no other reason, I would be in favor of an early marriage because of that. It’s a hard school, but you can’t go through it without acquiring a lot of valuable knowledge you can never get from books. You will learn patience and tolerance, and patience and cooperation, and patience and more patience.
The girl. You started out thinking she was a spoiled brat. Now you know she is an angel. The chances are she is both. Being a spoiled brat doesn’t mean she hasn’t plenty of good qualities hidden away. Being an angel doesn’t mean she can’t be spoiled again. Her love for you apparently has brought all her best qualities to the surface, where they shine like beaten gold. You say her parents are genuinely surprised by the change that has come over her. She has become serious where before she was giddy; she has become thoughtful where before she was thoughtless. And love has wrought this wondrous miracle! Is it a real miracle or only the appearance of one? Is this new Gloria the substance, and the old Gloria the shadow? Or vice versa? Or are there two inextricably mixed Glorias awaiting your magic to bring out the better one and make it the dominant personality? You’ll never know until you have to work at it.
Her mother. From what you have told me about her, you need expect very little assistance from that quarter. She is and always will be Gloria’s natural ally. Proudly she carries a banner on which you may read this illuminating slogan: “My daughter! May she always be right, but right or wrong, my daughter!”
Her father. He seems to hold the key position just now. You are working for him — and what will he think when you tell him you have nominated him to be your father-in-law? From what I gather so far, he seems to be a pretty reasonable, sensible, practical fellow; so maybe he won’t be so surprised as you think. Whether you work for him or somebody else should make little difference, so long as you do your work well. Why should he care whether you are driving his car or somebody else’s car or your own car, if driving a car is the job? Being sensible, he probably doesn’t care a hoot. He will undoubtedly want to know if you are honest and ambitious and intelligent; if you have a good mind and a sound body; if you are willing to work, and work hard; if you have intestinal fortitude and the yeast of growth in you.
What more can a young man hope to bring to marriage these days? Money? He hasn’t had the time or the opportunity to make it himself, and any other kind comes too easy not to go the same way. Position? The only position that does you any good in the long run is what you make for yourself, and that again takes years of hard work. If a young man needs only capital or an opportunity and has all the other assets, I see no reason why he should not accept, or the prospective father-in-law should not extend, such assistance. There was sound economics in the dot, or dower, system in the older countries. And isn’t it just as sound today in your own land, if the dot takes the shape of opportunity for the young man to marry and get started rather than force him and the girl to wait for years, until the bloom has been taken off their romance?
If I were your prospective father-in-law instead of your father, I would look at it something like this: I have a daughter who is young and attractive and full of beans. She is better off married to someone she loves than batting around hunting for thrills and winding up a few years from now jaded and too hard to please. I have no son, and this young man, if he has the right stuff in him, could be a son to me. Why, then, shouldn’t I give him the chance to work his way up in my business and learn how to handle it, so that eventually I can turn the reins over to a young man who belongs in the family, instead of to some stranger? Why should I expect him to wait until he can support my daughter in the manner to which she is accustomed? That is much too rich for her blood, as it is, and she would be better off starting all over again at the modest scale on which her mother and I started.
At the same time, this may be one of those puppy-love infatuations. How do I know? How will I find out? Time is a subtle ally. Time will tell if they really love each other; time will tell if the young man has the makings in him. I will ask them both to wait one year. In that year I will give the young man every opportunity in my business to show what he can do. If he makes good and proves to me that he has the potential capacity for business and social success, I will give them my blessing and help them on their way. If he doesn’t make good for me or the girl in that time, nobody has lost anything, nobody has been hurt, and we can all sit down together then, discuss the new situation, and come to a reasonable decision based on experience instead of guesswork.
That’s what I would say if I were the girl’s father. I find it even easier to say since I am not her father, but yours. What will he say? Go and ask him. But first look around for the nearest exit, and, in case of emergency, be prepared to run, not walk.
Affectionately,
Dad
Previous: The Boss’s Daughter
Coming soon: Separated from Love
Leap Year Role Reversal
According to a 1606 tome Courtship, Love, and Marriage quoted in 1884 leap year articles across the country, the leap day was once reserved as a time for women to propose to men. Imagine that! Furthermore, some sources claimed a man couldn’t refuse such a proposal without paying a hefty fine to the spurned lover, variously described as a large sum of cash, enough fabric for a silk dress, or 12 pairs of gloves. With that background, the following is a collection of leap year stories from the pages of the Post:
Civil War Personal Ad
March 12, 1864
A Chicago girl, tired of waiting for the young men who don’t “propose” — probably on account of the expense, or the preponderance of the girls since the war broke out — takes advantage of the season, and speaks out boldly in her own name in the “Wants” column of the Chicago Tribune, as follows: “This is leap year. I’ll wait no longer. So here I am, twenty-one years of age, prepossessing, medium size, healthy, educated, prudent, large sparkling eyes, long black flowing hair, and as full of fun as a chestnut is full of meat, born to make some man happy, and want a home. Does anybody want me?”
Nowhere to Hide, April 12, 1864
A man, in order to avoid the annoyances of leap year, wore a card on the breast of his coat, with this inscription: “I am engaged.” Despite this, a woman tackled him and married him inside of two weeks.
Mother Knows Best, July 2, 1892
Here is the story of a servant girl, who has not found leap year a failure. She lives in Portland, Me.
A Boston paper says the girl told her mistress that she was going to get married, and showed her some wedding clothes and a hat that she had bought. “What does the young man do?” asked the mistress. “Shure, an’ I aint seen him yit,” was the reply, “but me mother says I must git married this year, anyway.” The two had actually arranged everything before the man was even thought of.
Soon after the girl told her mistress that she met a young man and was going to make him marry her. She began to send him various little presents, boxes of candy, etc. She couldn’t read or write and got the children of the household to direct the parcels for her. So well did the girl and her mother manage that, contrary to the wishes of the young man’s family, he was courted and married and settled down in less than three months from the time he first met his bride.
Ladies’ Night Etiquette, March 2, 1872
The following are the leap-year ballroom regulations established by the ladies of St. Louis: “Gentlemen are expected to be as lady-like as possible, therefore, no gentleman will be allowed to enter the ball-room except on the arm of his escort or one of the managers; no gentleman can dance unless invited to do so by a lady; no gentleman can enter the supper-room unless escorted by a lady; the lady managers will see that no gentleman is neglected.”
St. Valentine’s Day in Leap Year — A Solemn Warning to Single Men
February 12, 1876Bachelors all, of St. Valentine’s Day beware!
This year is Leap Year: the ladies may choose!
How then you get in the fair sex’s way beware,
Or both your hearts and your freedom you’ll lose.
Princesses-waitresses,
Curly or straight tresses,
Fond hearts or traitresses,
Short ones or tall;
Elderly—youthful,
Deceitful or truthful,
Unfeeling or ruthful,
Beware of them all!
Theirs is the question this year; and for popping it,
No opportunity will they omit.
They may propose; and you’ve no chance of stopping it;
“Please ask mamma” does not answer a bit.
They’ll grant no truces,
Delays or excuses;
Resistance no use is
To Leap Year’s mad freak,
That one chance of Hymen.
For nervous and shy men,
(The girls can’t think why men
Are frightened to speak.)
As for myself; I am terrified awfully—
“No” to a woman ne’er yet have I said,
So run a great risk of behaving unlawfully
Marrying all who may ask me to wed.
In fear, dash my wig, am I
Standing of bigamy,
Not to say trigamy;
Oh, what a fix!
There is no hope escape of;
I’m in for the scrape of
My fate, in the shape of
The year seventy six.
Then bachelors all, be advised-take warning,
There’s a great deal more danger than many suppose
Who are treating my sad admonition with scorning,
And make bosom friends of their poor bosom’s foes.
Of their dreams they will wake out,
And find the mistake out.
When the fair ones they break out
On Valentine’s day.
And kneeling before us,
Declare they adore us,
And sing in a chorus-
“Be mine, love, I pray!”
