Songs for 13-year-olds

[avram]

Chris and I went to the bat mitzvah of a relative of mine on Saturday. Just the reception; the actual ceremony was in the morning. My bar mitzvah reception was mostly for my relatives (I realized in retrospect once I had the perspective of adulthood); this one was for the 13-year-olds. The deejay spent the whole evening working the crowd pretty hard. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have that much energy. I even danced a bit.

Chris and I kept track of the songs played whose lyrics would probably be considered innappropriate if most people listened to lyrics. (Which they don’t. Would the Reagan campaign have referenced “Born in the USA” if they’d realized that it’s a song about how crappy life is for working-class Americans?) There was Donna Summers’s “Bad Girls”, about streetwalkers, and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, about an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. We expected the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” at any moment.