Sorry Mother

Despicable me. I went to Kanchanaburi a few weekends ago and could not help but think of my poor mother. Now what on earth could have made me think of my mother while in this picturesque resort town in the western province of Thailand? Mitch Miller, that’s what, or rather who? Yup that's right, none other than Mitch Miller of the Sing Along with Mitch fame. For the under 50 young’uns’ who most probably have absolutely no idea who or what Sing Along with Mitch is, let me enlighten you. In the early 1960s, Mitch Miller became a household name, I least in our house!, with his NBC television show Sing Along with Mitch, a community-sing program featuring him and a male chorus where viewers were presented with lyrics at the bottom of the television screen where they could sing along, keeping time with a bouncing ball…kind of like a prehistoric MTV mixed in with early karaoke but with a bouncing ball and extremely corny songs. My mother adored Mitch…actually Mitch was one of the three people on the planet that she revered the most, my Dad being the first and Lawrence Welk being the third. Good old sing-along Mitch Miller was sandwiched right there between my Dad and Lawrence Welk in the hallowed section of my mother’s mind.  Not a bad place to be and reason enough to justify him receiving the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.

Anyways, where does Kanchanaburi fit in with Mitch Miller and my mother? First of

Posing in front of the Bridge on the River Kwai

all, I have to admit that I didn’t know much about Kanchanaburi other than it was in the middle of Thailand's wild west, where during WW2 Japanese forces used Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and conscripted Asian labourers to build a rail route to Myanmar. The harrowing story became famous after a fictional tale, based loosely on the real events, was told in Pierre Boulle’s book The Bridge Over the River Kwai and the 1957 movie based on the book. This infamous bridge over the Mae klong Rier (aka River Kwai) is the most sought out and well-known part of the area, due to the book and film. Although the book and film is largely fiction, it is this movie that draws so many tourists to Kanchanaburi. The bridge was erected through the forced labor of British, Dutch, and American prisoners of war during WWII. The bridge was part of the Thai-Burmese "Death Railway," so named because of the scores of men who died during construction. Japanese forces, bad dudes at that time, oversaw the project, as the railway would have helped bring supplies to their troops who were fighting the British in neighbouring Burma.

So again, what is the connection between my mother and Mitch Miller and the Thai province that is the nexus of the Thailand-Burma Railway during World War II?

Back to the early 60’s, on one particular Thursday night when Sing Along with Mitch was on, and therefore the world (at least my mother’s world) stopped rotating on its axis, my brothers and I just happened to be in the same living room where my mother was going all bat shit crazy singing along to Mitch’s bouncing balls. Now, my brother Jack, who has always had this knack of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, a knack, I must add, that he eventually developed and perfected to a quasi art form, muttered something to the effect of ‘how much more of this whistling dipstick do we have to listen to?’ Egads! My mother’s reaction to my brother Jack’s typical 14-year-old philosophical and rather unflattering remark in regards to Saint Mitch and his whistling talents, well, let’s just say that I had never ever experienced my mother ‘losing it’ like she lost it then. The proverbial caca hit the proverbial fan; a total emotional meltdown occurred. My other brother, the older and wiser one, attributed this meltdown to a symptom of the onset of pre-menopause, which my brother Jack and I had no idea what he was talking about but believed him because he was our older brother, hence wiser and infallible. Anyways, I remember the episode well, as if it had just happened yesterday…

And the connection being…

Before our trip to Kanchanaburi, we decided to Netflix the movie Bridge on the River Kwai. Although this is a fictional movie based on a fictional novel, we believed that it would give us an historical perspective and get us excited about what we were about to see the following day.  In the first scene of the movie, the POWs enter the camp whistling the first strain of the march “Colonel Bogey” … this is when every fibre of my body became consumed with the dark reminder of that time when my brothers and I had unintentionally pained our mother and caused her to cry. Colonel Bogey was the tune that Mitch Miller and his chorus of whistling men were whistling on that fateful Thursday night in the early 60's. So there you have it, that is why when crossing the bridge over the river Kwai, I could not help but be haunted by that tune and think of my poor insulted mother.  Sorry Mother.

         

Sorry Mom