Tunesday : Have a Banana

Have a Banana

 Performed by The Beatles and Brian Matthew, from Live at the BBC (1994)

Brian: Is that it? Is that the end?
Paul: Yeah, yeah, that's it.
John: Fade, fade!
Brian: Good track. Oh, well, we'll stop there, stop there, stop there.
John: What an end!
Brian: Quiet! All right, George.
John: Fade!
Brian: Hold it!
George: Oh, thank you.
John: Fade, you silly.
Brian: Well, we did. We did that. Oh, no! No! We've done that bit!
John: The train comes in now.
Brian: We did that.
John: Yeah.
Brian: To prove we weren't playing the record, then, you see. 'Cause, otherwise, there's no point in you being here, is there? Ha, ha, ha!
John: Yeah, we did that, 'cause it sounds just like it, don't it?
Brian: Pretty cool lot of fellows, aren't you? Here, Ringo, have a banana, catch!

Okay, this isn't really a song, and I've never heard of it before, but it's too on-point for me not to use. Lolo told me this story the other day:

Ella (11) was at a sleepover with two 12-year-old friends and they decided to play Truth or Dare, using an app from Ella's iPad. When a dare came up to "Eat a piece of fruit as sexily as possible", Sam (more Linda's friend than Ella's) excitedly volunteered to do it and she asked the other girls if they would film it for her. Ella felt really uncomfortable with this, and when Linda offered to do the filming, Ella apparently walked away. Sam immediately went for a banana from the fruit bowl, Linda filmed her performance, and the girls went back to the game.

But wait; there's more. Linda's Mom called Lolo the next day to explain that Sam had taken her mother's cell phone to the sleepover (without permission) and this Mom had freaked out when she discovered the video of her young daughter mouthing a banana on it. Sam did her best to deflect blame by pointing out that Linda did the filming and that it was Ella who made the dare and this Mom had called Linda's Mom to vent and explain that her daughter wouldn't be hanging out with the other girls anymore. Lolo and Linda's Mom had a reasonable discussion about how girls at that age are equally curious and oblivious about sex, and although Lolo felt bad about Sam's Mom's reaction, after talking to Ella, Lolo didn't feel bad about her own daughter's part in it. Lolo did talk to Sam's Mom the next day and they agreed that it was a good thing that the video hadn't been posted online anywhere and that it was a good opportunity for all three Moms to talk to their girls about modern, permanent consequences, and although Sam is still not allowed to hang out with the other girls, Lolo feels like she has done all she could do. And the funny aside: Linda's Mom was apparently shown the video and Sam has no clue what eating a banana as sexily as possible should look like. 

I wanted to share the above story because it reminded me of something that happened in my own youth. At around 12 or 13, Cora and I started telling each other sexy stories about what would happen to us if we were stranded on a desert island with our favourite Beatle. Keeping in mind that we didn't have access to porn or even detailed gossip from older sisters, our fantasies were probably pretty basic and unerotic, but I do remember that it was a convention in our stories that banana peels were used as condoms (convenient detail for tying it all together, no?).

At one point, we wrote some of the stories down -- and I don't remember whether we wrote the stories when we were together or if we wrote them when we were apart to read to each other later -- but either way, that was our downfall: Cora's Mom eventually found them. And was she mad, as only a stern Irish Mammy could get. She waved the pieces of paper in our beet-red faces, read out some choice phrases, and concluded with some good advice, "Never write anything down that you would be ashamed to have your mother find."

And has that advice ever been more apropos than today? I can't imagine what Sam's motivation was to want to be filmed with the banana, but at least her Mom was able to delete the video; had it been uploaded, the internet is forever and unforgiving. Would Cora and I have uploaded our stories to some bizarre website had they existed at the time? I don't know; maybe? As the recent federal election has shown, there are plenty of people with the skills and patience to comb the web for youthful missteps that can torpedo a political career, so chickens tend to come home to roost long after we've forgotten about them. Girls will be girls, boys will be boys, but perhaps society will be okay for as long as we're all capable of feeling shame in front of our Mammies.

Here, Ringo, have a banana, catch!