BijouBlog

In the 1970s, a youngish housewife in the west suburbs of Chicago dances to this tune on the green shag carpet. She gets her toddler to do it, swinging him by the arms. Her high school age son looks on with a combination of horror and embarrassment.

More than 40 years later, at her grandson's bar mitzvah in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, Bubby Ruth Goldstein (known for her get up and go) takes over the dance floor from her hip hop loving grandson and his friends when the band, in an effort to get everyone involved (an exhausting but necessary requirement for such functions), tries the nostalgia trick. It works.

Has this song become only a nostalgic camp crowd pleaser? Perhaps. I know the current Village People perform primarily on the nostalgia circuit (I saw them at gay Halsted Market Days and at “straight” Taste of Chicago because these popular commercialized festivals attract multiple ages and they need the “older crowd” of boomers with the spending power these days).

But there's a history behind and after it which, despite the campy appeal of the piece, is quite interesting because what we normally seem to think is true about this song ain't necessarily so.

According to Felipe Rose, the group's founder in an interview with the Huffington Post, "I don't think Jacques' intent (Jacques Morali, the original producer of the group) was, 'Oh, I'm just going to put together a group for the gay audience,'" says group member Eric Anzalone (the biker). "He knew the music industry and he knew if he had a hit in the clubs -- which, in the '70s, the gay, the Latin clubs -- that was the place to be." Thus, perhaps, the gay subtext was not meant originally.

Bananas have become pretty much a staple food in America (and also a source of much sexual innuendo, see below), but they are a comparatively recent addition to food culture in Western civilization.

It's obvious that before the opening up of the New World and global trade routes and technologies that bananas weren't easily accessible to Europeans. But even as late as the Victorian period, when one could buy them, they weren't exactly a popular food item. And not because of Victorian prudery. Many Victorians complained the fruit tasted like soap.

By 1910, however, bananas were consumed widely enough that slipping on a banana peel became a trope in Western physical comedy

According to Wikepedia, an American comedy recording from 1910 features a popular character of the time, "Uncle Josh", claiming to describe his own such incident:

Now I don't think much of the man that throws a banana peelin' on the sidewalk, and I don't think much of the banana peel that throws a man on the sidewalk neither ... my foot hit the bananer peelin' and I went up in the air, and I come down ker-plunk, jist as I was pickin' myself up a little boy come runnin' across the street ... he says, "Oh mister, won't you please do that agin? My little brother didn't see you do it."

The song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” was written by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn and originally released in 1923; for many decades, it was the best-selling sheet music in history. Since then then the song has been rerecorded several times and has been particularly popular during banana shortages.

Banana shortages occurred during WWII in England primarily because of the Japanese takeover of Malaysia; in America, which did not suffer such an involuntary shortage, they had become such a staple of cookery by the 1950s that bizarre concoctions such as the infamous ham and banana cassserole.

The Chiquita banana lady became iconic; in fact, she died recently. Her name was Monica Lewis; I remember her in a smaller part as a secretary who gets pushed out of an elevator in the movie Earthquake.

Bananas as aphrodisiacs tie into the old sympathetic magic idea that the the shape of an item ties into the physical and emotional qualities of similarly-shaped items (like the mandrake root, another reputed sexual energy source, which resembles a cock and balls). The shape resembles that of the penis; but interestingly enough, the symbolism may actually reflect reality, because they also contain bromelain, an enzyme which Dr. Oz says triggers testosterone production, and the fruit's potassium and vitamin B elevate energy levels.

The phallic allusions in bananas are ominipresent. In fact, the cover artwork for the debut album of The Velvet Underground features a banana made by Andy Warhol. On the original vinyl LP version, the design allowed the listener to "peel" this banana to find a pink, peeled phallic banana on the inside.

I think it's the act of peeling the fruit and having to basically hold the soft inside and swallow it as one long object (one only need maybe to cut it up when it gets too small to hold) that seems to evoke endless potentials for sexual innuendo.
 

Are brick-and-mortar bookstores, or gasp, even books, now a thing of the past, like rotary phones, local savings and loans, and milkmen?

Some might argue that the medium of print has evolved into diverse, flexible, electronic formats such as Kindle and will continue to evolve. But I think there's a deeper message here, and to understand it, we need to go back even further, before the days of gay liberation.

I was reading on the precarious faculty blog site (which calls itself an online reading room) that workers' reading and education tradition include Mechanics' Institutes (1800) and Reading Rooms in union halls. Dorothy Day's February 1940 Day by Day column in 61b5310b3bed3The Catholic Worker61b5310b3bed4 specifically mentions the reading rooms in every union she visited. Samuel Gompers' cigar rollers even voted to have a member on the clock read to them as they worked!

Imagine! Someone reading to you as an adult, not a child! And at work!

Now, in the monasteries and convents up to the days before Vatican II, as part of the religious discipline, someone would be assigned to read while the monks and nuns ate meals in the refectory. (I can't fathom something comparable happening in today's virtual offices!)

The experience implied that language was something that was savored patiently, like a gourmet meal or a good sex scene with a partner willing to go beyond slam, bang, thank you ma'am. Whether you experienced it reading out loud or silently, the act was both individual and communal.

In the past, going to a bookstore meant you were both browsing alone but also doing it physically, in a public place where you could, without incurring suspicion, hang out for hours. Going to a LGBT bookstore implied you were also part of a community of shared values, and you not only showed your affinity my physically hanging out there, but also by purchasing a physical source of knowledge and values and taking it into your home environment. Even if you had to hide the book or magazine, it became something sacred because it was taboo, and thus a tangible, living connection with the deepest part of your identity.

Social media is fast and convenient and works wonders to connect others with shared values in crisis situations, but what bothers me about it is that the word element gets lost: the word as both language and also something that a live person embodies in an “I-Thou” dialogue. Kind of like Judaism's idea of the Torah as the eternal voice of God or the Christian theology of the Word made flesh. Something that needs more than a tweet or a non-verbal instagram to express.

Joan Didion predicted something this dynamic would happen in her study of the 1960s counterculture, 61b5310b3bed3Slouching Towards Bethlehem61b5310b3bed4, where she decried that the reliance on images and quick fixes (slogans like" All You Need Is Love") to complex problems, caused a loss of critical thinking: “The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.” 

In those 1960s, feeling groovy meant you needed to “slow down, you're moving too fast, gotta make the morning last.” In the 21st century, where and when can you even slow down? Definitely not in a tweet. And sadly, no longer in a bookstore.