When Rule-Keeping Can't Save You

When I was growing up, The Carpenters made what was simultaneously the most innocent and the most ecstatic music since, maybe, the early days of rock and roll.

Everyone loved The Carpenters -- parents, kids ... well, maybe not stoners, but I think a lot of them grew up to admit a sort of grudging admiration. The Carpenters' music was, in a word, wholesome, and that was not cool at all.

Imagine, then, the horrid fascination when Karen Carpenter died of a disease so unheard of that news anchors referred to it by its full name -- anorexia nervosa -- and had to explain what it meant. How could someone so clean cut die of such a weird, creepy, obsessive disease?

As it turns out, anorexia was a disease tailor-made for the clean-cut, driven, image-conscious achiever. The All-American Girl. If Karen Carpenter wanted to blaze a trail, this was almost certainly not the way she wanted to do it.

Before she died, even their sad songs made me happy -- probably because my hyper-religious parents didn't turn off the TV when The Carpenters came on. Today, I can't listen to The Carpenters without feeling tremendous sadness. The dream let Karen Carpenter down in the worst way possible, and all the rule-keeping in the world couldn't save her.

That's actually good news -- The Good News to some of us. The only problem is, One already died to set us free. It shouldn't have had to happen to another.

The Carpenters with "Rainy Days and Mondays".