We learn some really strange songs in elementary school. Case in point: Miss Mary Mac. You know—the chick with all the black and the buttons and the elephants and fences and weird, weird shit. Remember this one? I do. And unfortunately, this little diddy has been rolling around in my brain for the past week or two. It's mainly due to the fact that our real estate agent in New Jersey has a name that can be shortened to "Mary Mac." And she has done just that with her email address. So when I send her an email, or receive one from her, the song lyrics to Miss Mary Mac immediately pop into my head. And so now it doesn't even take an email. The lyrics just remain there. For hours. Even in sleep, through elephant-filled dreams. And when I wake, wake, wake. They're still there, there, there. Damn you, Mary Mac! What cruel joke is this? I mean, I could easily make my email davycrockett at goaheadandtrytogetthatfreakinsongoutofyourhead.com. (He is, after all, king of the wild frontier.) But I've got some semblance of common courtesy, you know? Manners. And I wouldn't do that to my friends. Or my enemies.

Okay, so the deed is done. The song is here, firmly planted. So what of it, anyway? What of Mary Mac? And why? And whereto? And damn it all, what the hell? And so on and so forth. I mean, the significance, brother. What is it? Maybe a close-reading is in order.


I think Mary Mac was a Goth. Which is fine. Girls dressed in black turned out to be something I was quite fond of in high school and college. Maybe this song planted that seed. But I didn't know what Goth was in 1st grade. I did know black was dangerous. And that sometimes bad could be very, very good. And thank holy goodness for that. Because age 19 would have been much more boring without that knowledge.


If there is a gun in act one, it will certainly be used in act three. And if there are buttons in verse two, they will certainly come undone by verse ten. Okay, maybe not. But they would if my 6-year-old brain had anything to do with it. I blame school for my lascivious imagination. Because I've got to blame somebody. And my dad gets blamed for far too much.


It takes a lot more than fifty cents for me to see elephants jump over a fence now. But in elementary school, this seemed perfectly plausible. In fact, just saying the words made it so. Elephants jumping fences: it was that easy. The mere suggestion, and an entire world in which young boys and girls paid money to go see such things opened up before me. The grass was green. The sky was blue. And the weather was always 72 degrees and fair with no bugs. It was a world I could understand. And on some level, thankfully, I still do.


The moral here is, even if you're going to be subversive and weird, it's important to be patriotic. These elephants knew it. Mary Mac knew it. And, by God, I know it.

I never did the hand-clap thing that the girls did while singing this tune. Mainly because that was a "girl" thing. And if nothing else, I was always the spittin' image of macho, even through the years I maintained a rat-tail. I never once envied these girls for their hand-clapping adroitness. Or sat idly by wishing I too could clap like that. Not once. But they could sit there and make up verses to this thing and clap and keep it going forever. And by "forever" I mean the full five minutes or so when we'd line up between classes.

So, in that spirit, does anybody have their own lyrics they'd like to add? Try and keep it clean. You know, like the original.

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