Blogocentric Formulations

I know you wanna leave me, but I refuse to let you go

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DAY 20

Song: "Ain't Too Proud to Beg"
Artist: The Temptations
Album: n/a, released as a single (1966)

I've always loved oldies, and this is one of my favorite oldies songs. I first heard "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" on The Big Chill soundtrack (great album, by the way!), and it's become a staple of my growing oldies collection ever since. There are two distinct memories that come with this song for me:

The first is when my grandparents finally moved into a retirement community. They had lived in Montana for years, and then spent the better part of a decade living in a house near my parents as they got older, needed warmer weather, etc. Eventually, though, the house got to be too much upkeep so they sold it and moved into an apartment in a retirement community. When they did, my parents too a lot of the stuff they had accumulated over the years and stored it for them at our house. Two of the coolest things we inherited from that process were a box of about 5,000 slides (many of which you can find in the video I did for my grandfather's funeral service: "A moment of love, a dream, a laugh, a kiss, a cry" ), and the other was a huge box of 45s (hey lizco252, has anyone mentioned those yet? ) that my grandfather had collected over his many years. "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" was one of the first once I noticed on the top of the stack, and I listened to that thing until I'm pretty sure I started wearing out the vinyl. Even though I had it on cassette tape with The Big Chill soundtrack, there was something different and cool about dropping a needle on a piece of vinyl and listening to a song that way.

The second memory I have of this song is when I first moved to Los Angeles and I used to go see movies at the Chinese Theater. It was a long drive from my apartment in Long Beach, but for a film major and a movie buff, it was amazing to see a movie in the historic Chinese Theater, which is unlike any theater I've ever been to. As an added bonus, there was a Johnny Rockets restaurant in the shopping center adjoining the nearby Kodak Theater and they had a waiter who had choreographed an entire dance to this song. It was only this song, but whenever it played, he would literally burst out from his station in the kitchen, stand in the middle of the restaurant floor, and bust out this dance while customers gathered around and whooped and hollered. When the song was over, he'd rush back into the kitchen to finish grilling the burgers. My friends and I had endless fun requesting that song two or three times over the course of a meal... and the guy came out and did the dance every single time.