The album is from 1974, but we got our grubby little hands on a copy of a tape in the early 80s, which we played so often we had the words down pat in weeks. Would you believe we memorized the recording with a skip intact. “Are you small?” (audience laughter) “Are you small?” (audience laughter) “Are you small?” (audience laughter) — “No, I’m tall, I’m tall.”
Fuck, no, we didn’t understand many of the jokes. “Two fruits walk down the street” — I imagined a pineapple holding hands with a banana. But we knew the words were magical.
What’s funnier still is that I was in my twenties before I understood half the jokes. Yet this album was our soundtrack. The words are scrawled through our yearbooks and letters back and forth. Just one line—that’s all we’d need to collapse. “And now for a little foggy mountain breakdown…”
So when my best friend of more than 3 decades sent me Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up, I read the memoir in a single sitting. I’ve been carrying the book around with me for weeks, just flipping through to re-read passages whenever I feel like slipping back in time.
