Essay

Midnight Confessions

By: Tracy Werth, 07/16/2018

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I feel like a ten-year-old again as I watch a YouTube clip of a 1968 television performance by the Grass Roots lip-synching their song “Midnight Confessions.” The lead singer looks gorgeous in his leather fringe jacket. His sexy moustache makes me wish my husband could grow his out again, the one I made him start wearing to hide his baby face back when we met in high school. He finally had to shave it last year when he was diagnosed with sleep apnea and could not get a good fit with his breathing machine’s mask.
After decades of suffering through a lousy night’s sleep because of his snoring, I thought things were looking up when his doctor promised that the apnea machine would end his snoring. Instead, the whoosh, whoosh of cold air blowing in my direction against the background hum of the motor is actually worse, my ticket into moving into the guestroom. The women in my Scrabble group all agree it would be wonderful to have their own room.
And now here I am living that dream. Sometimes I just stand surveying the beautiful blue and white seaside theme I so carefully put together four years ago for our guestroom. How amazing that I now get to enjoy living among the delicate seashells and wood carved sea captains.
Besides, it became a struggle to read with the tiny clip-on book light I had to use when I slept with my husband so the light would not wake him. Now I can read quite well by my lovely lighthouse lamp on the white wicker nightstand.
The Grass Roots video clip focuses on the keyboard player’s angular features, perfectly-trimmed long sideburns an outline above his defined jawbone. One cannot help but marvel on the guy’s beautifully boyish representation of the era with that paisley scarf around his tanned neck.
The clip ends and I click on a different video of the band five years later singing “I’d Wait a Million Years.” The stylish guys are now grown men; the two singers still as handsome as ever. Their guitar player is Creed Bratton, who played the character “Creed” on NBC’s long-running comedy The Office. There is even a poll below one of the band’s other YouTube videos directed to kids born decades after The Grass Roots had their last hit: “Did you only look up this video to see the guy from The Office?”
Wow, here’s an early one of them doing Let’s Live for Today filmed in B&W; the band is introduced by Jimmy Durante, “They don’t have a manager; they have a gardener,” he jokes. Ha. Ha.
At least my baby boomer generation is not so out of touch as my parents and grandparents had been. My age group has embraced technology, even if it is to watch vintage videos on a computer screen or download MP3 versions of songs from the ‘60s.
It is a wonderful time to be alive in the amazing way I can plan a trip to Krakow by walking a little orange man around the streets of Poland on Google Maps, pay my bills without writing a check. Living in the past is my favorite part of this era promised us in the Jetsons cartoon with its promise of a robot housemaid which so far has only resulted in the Roomba vacuum cleaner. And now that old ounce of Mexican pot I used to buy for ten dollars from a guy behind the Phys Ed building after school has been replaced by a prescription for medical marijuana that costs a lot more than ten bucks. You can’t have it all.

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