My Mom Wants To Fake Rock-N-Roll All Nite

This post could also be titled "Being For The Benefit Of Mrs. B", but then it wouldn’t be a KISS reference as much as a Beatle’s reference. And the KISS reference is important here.

My mom is something of a saint to me. Since my ex (insert double entendre here) over three years ago, my mom has been coming to stay a couple days every week to help with my kids while I’m at work. It’s not a small thing since she lives a bit over an hour away. She wathces the youngest who will start school next year, she helps with homework, and more than anything else…she spends time on the phone.

She’s a township trustee, and a good one. It’s something of a thankless job, having to deal with local weasels and whiners for little pay. And it consumes a lot of phone time. She’s also pretty conservative in her tastes. It’s really getting her out of her shell to have her watch some lame reality television with us. But hey, family bonding time is family bonding time.

So imagine my surprise when I came home from running some errands the other evening with one of my daughters and found my mom, plastic guitar slung over her shoulders, playing Guitar Hero III. Specifically ‘Rock And Roll All Nite’ by KISS.

Her defense was "I’ve never played before and wanted to try it." I didn’t really care what her reason was. I just thought it was great she was playing.

So I grabbed the other guitar and we spent the next hour or so playing a few songs I’m sure she didn’t know or recognize the lyrics for. This is the woman who used to go around singing lines from Sublime’s ‘Santaria’ because she thought it was catchy after all. She never seemed to get to those bits where they sung about poppin’ a cap in the guy hitting on the girl. So I got some fun out of pointing out "Remember all those crazy posters we had in the basement when I was a kid? That was Iron Maiden, and this is one of their songs." Yes, I had my mom playing the bass line on ‘Number of the Beast’.

And then her phone rang in the middle of a song. And just that fast the band was broken up. She was on the phone talking about issues with the local fire department and our audience booed us off the stage.

But for a while, we were rockin’. And after all these years, my mom showed she had a bit of cool in her.