In our culture there are two prevalent stereotypes of “Catholic school girl.” Either it’s a girl who is incredibly chaste and innocent or a girl who in response to her upbringing is mischievous and rebellious.
Now I married a Catholic school girl. Diana was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school from grade school all the way through high school. Diana doesn’t fall isn’t either stereotypes. She is well balanced and has almost never felt a need to rebel from her upbringing (unless you count marrying me, which is a whole separate issue). ANYWAYS. . . .
Billy Joel on the other hand is dealing with one extreme: the Catholic girl who under the power of the Lord has not done anything bad, never takes a chance and of course would be seen with the protagonist that Billy Joel portrays.
Joel’s character uses brilliant “Barney Stinson” logic to convince this girl to go out with him and to loosen up and live a little.
Saints, the people who are good always seem to die young so wouldn’t you rather sin a little bit and have more time on earth to party? What young person wouldn’t rather “laugh with the sinners than die with the saints?”With an upbeat boogie-woogie baseline and a celebratory swinging horn section Joel revels in the glory of enjoying sin. What Joel is talking about isn’t anything really all that bad. He’s commenting on the atmosphere that he grew up in during the late 1950s. This was a time when the reaction Elvis Presley was that his dance moves were sinful and that his music was evil ala Jon Lithgow in Footloose. Do you remember all the things people said about Marolyn Manson being a bad influence on children? Yeah, the exactly same things verbatim were said about Elvis. Sigh, isn’t it nice to see how far we’ve gotten?
While this song is silly portrayal of teenage logic, it does have some interesting things to say about the nature of teenage sexuality. Joel makes statements about the Catholic education, “Virginia, they didn’t give you quite enough information.” Now I’m not here to judge Catholicism stance on sexual education, but Catholic schools aren’t exactly leaders in this field. The idea of a protagonist like Joel’s character doing the teaching to my daughter? ‘shudder’ This is why we need to really think hard about what we are teaching our children about sexuality.
Back to my wife. . .
Did I have to do a little persuading to convince Diana to go out with me? Yes. Did she reject me the first time I asked her out. . . kind of. . . but it was all worth it. Now it’s not like I was Billy Joel’s character. I wasn’t out to corrupt Diana. I did teach her how to better utilize expletives in her daily discourse and I am responsible for her enjoying of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which does feature pagan witchcraft. However, Diana found the Harry Potter books herself so I can’t be held responsible that level of sin she has sunk down to.
Joel sings, “sooner or later it comes down to fate, I might as well be the one" which reminds me of convincing Diana to go out with me. I wasn’t going to leave it to fate, Diana was too special a person to pass up. And I thank God every day that she chose me to be the one.
I would like to say for the record that I did not "reject" Kingsley the first time he asked me out! He just called up to my dorm when I was still asleep asking if I wanted brunch now, and I said no because I was still in my PJ's!
ReplyDeleteI too married a Catholic School Girl who kind of falls out of the stereotypes. A side note about the “didn’t give you enough information” bit of your post. My wife ended up teaching the Sex Ed section of her class because the nun in charge was too embarrassed by the subject matter. Armed with this knowledge, I think that Billy may have had a point.
ReplyDelete