Regret

Yesterday, I was cooking, and playing a cd I made of old tunes. By old, I mean my mother's high school years. That's about how old I get with music interest. Elvis, Peggy Lee, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Patsy Cline...who's with me? And my all-time favorite song came on. I truly believe that my cooking is better when I get a chance to shake my booty while stirring. In the event I have to whisk something....it's high risk adventure cooking. I'm cooking with love and fury all at once.

So, I'm cooking and I'm dancing, and that's when the regret hits me. This song is the exact explanation of the man I wanted to marry, the marriage I have, and the marriage I hope to have for a very long time. Just like the song, it's got longevity, it's fun, it's got soul and I don't care if it's not in my age group, it is perfect. This song SHOULD have been our wedding song, our first dance. We considered it, but we just weren't quite sure how we'd dance to it. And this was the only dance I was getting out of Ricardo that day.

With all that doubt, we went with At Last, by Etta James. It's a good song. Sentimental. Very descriptive of the road Ricardo and I took to get to the alter. However, too slow. Too Sappy. In hindsight, we should have gone with our gut, it wouldn't have been a slow song, but a fun song. We could have danced to it just fine. As a matter of fact, when Ricardo gets home....we're going to dance to it:

Shamma Lamma Ding Dong by Lloyd Williams is my all time world favorite song.

So, I'm officially, blogficially, changing our wedding song, Ricardo & Leslie's song to Shamma Lamma Ding Dong.

You've heard this song before. Yes you have. Yes you HAVE. YES YOU HAVE! Work with me here. The first time I heard this song was when I watched Animal House (Otis Day and the Knights, or "Otis, my man!" in the film). I watched Animal House with my Dad, a lot. It's a very sentimental film to me, and makes me feel closer to my dad, and know what my dad was like in college. The man would tear up because he could relate so well to those guys. So, he would have LOVED it if we'd danced to that song at our wedding. Dangit!

The second time I heard this song was at my sixteenth birthday party. My pal, Mols, and some other pals all got together and threw me a huge surprise party. A little band we were all pals with from youth group (yes, they let me in the ole church youth group) came and serenaded me with a little, you guessed it, Shamma Lamma Ding Dong.

But nothing sums it all up for me and my Ricardo, like when I hear it from the Animal House Soundtrack, they have the sound byte when they pull up to the bar and walk in and Boon says, "Wait 'til Otis sees us! He Loved Us!" For some reason, it just speaks to the heart for me. To know us is to love us. I hope!

I hereby declare our wedding song Shamma Lamma Ding Dong.

That's how I roll.