Song Of The Day 4/12/2016: Mabel Scott – “Baseball Boogie”

Baseball Week – I love this number, but I gotta say it: Baseball-as-metaphor-for-sex has never sat well with me. It's not that I'm a prude -- really I'm not, just look up my file next time you're at the FBI. It's just that there aren't a lot of baseball-type maneuvers that you can believably repurpose into something nasty without a whole lot of extensions of logic. Yeah, so there's a bat. Okay, there you go: A single phallus. Swinging away at a small globe being hurled at 90 miles an hour. The only erotic act I can think of that motion comes close to is the Nantucket Sling and that hasn't even been officially decriminalized yet. I suppose there's also a similarity with the Tulsa Flyswatter, maybe the Archbishop's Jangler, but there's no way Tin Pan Alley could have known about those particular acts when this song was written. They were like the Trotsky Dollop and Scheherazade's Rubric: acts so pre-emptively bizarre that mainstream America wouldn't have even understood them if they talked about them. Not like the Cornhusker's Callous or Hoover's Duodenum, the ruins of many a farmhand and farmer's daughter, respectively. Or perverse acts that were relegated to the suburbs like the Happy Calculator, Mitzi's Interrogation, The Throttle & Glue, Labradors In The Stock Exchange, The Dispossessed Lactologist, Dolby Noise Reduction, The Gherkin Speaks or Now That's What I Call A Merchant Marine. Or the grossly sinful acts you found in rural communities like The 1943 Tar Spill, The Sentient Jumprope, Mound Or Abscess?, My Broker Is E.F. Hutton And He Says..., Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Trampoline Enthusiast, the Understudy Cheerleader, Streetwalking Vicars, Look Boneward Angel, Twelve Angry Men And A Stenographer Who Did Not Sign Up For This, the Turnpike Somersault, Uncle Lefty's Cannon Fodder, the Gorton's Fisherman, Jam-N-Brisket, and Fatty Arbuckle.

My literary agent just threw her drink in my face and stomped out.