Acting Your Age

I don't know which of the vocal competition shows I was watching -- you know how they all look alike after awhile -- but I learned one thing.

During that season, one of the competitors was an older roots-rocker. On a show where the audience and the other singers skewed younger, the roots rocker made a decision to play to that audience. It turned out to be his fatal mistake.

One of the judges gave the singer a note about the inadvisability of choosing a song from a younger generation. At the time, it didn't make sense to me, but now, I see the wisdom of it. What listener wants someone at or near their parents' age to interpret their music for them? What singer wants to make the mistake of failing to account for the considerable cultural baggage that all popular music comes with, and offering a disastrous reading in the process?

If I'd had kids, they'd have grown up watching Pete and Pete, and likely singing this song. Even so, I'd be tempted to make an exception for this one, because it turns out, Polaris is singing about a situation in which we're all little children, regardless of our chronological age.

There is one subject -- and only one -- about which it is socially-acceptable for all of us to wonder: whether there is some thing or Someone bigger than ourselves out there.

Among Christians, that childlike wonder is the price of a ticket to heaven. This song is about tens of thousands of people who gave in to the wonder at a Billy Graham crusade in Central Park -- and one who was selling his own brand of it outside the gates.

Somehow, one crazy guy knew that all the people inside were looking for a daddy. He knew that most of them would not, much to Graham's frustration, fix on Jesus, but on Graham himself. If they could just tell him their problems!

The massive scale of the event would have made that impossible, of course, and here was this nut job subconsciously offering himself as an alternative. Because, let's face it: The guy who's currently dangling advice or approval in front of us can be kind of a prick on his off days. A new daddy holds out the promise of understanding, even if the only thing he understands is our disillusionment with the current authority figure.

So, we spill our deepest darkest for the price of attention, welcoming new restrictions as though they are holy. When, months or years down the line, we find out that they are anything but, we succumb to disillusionment once again, lashing out at the futility and hypocrisy of it all until the next daddy comes along. All the while, we're singing our own, bratty version of Polaris' "Waiting For October" in yet another act of hopeful rebellion, never imagining that we could avoid the whole vicious cycle if only we'd walk the other way.