Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

One week I decided to perform a dance to the McCoys song “Hang On Sloopy.” Children, even less so than adults, often have little concept of genre or even of a song’s actual meaning; all songs are kids’ songs once they hear them. I liked “Hang On Sloopy” because it sounded like it was a tune about the dog “Snoopy.” And so I wanted to do a dance for Snoopy, and thus for everyone else in my fifth-grade music class. The dance I choreographed—and I use the term “choreography” loosely, the way you’d call adding milk to cereal “cooking”—was a combination of marching and punching, and probably resembled aerobics being done by a penguin. I was not graceful. I was coordinated, athletic, and fit, but very gawky. I wore an oversized raspberry-colored T-shirt, the sleeves too long to be called short and too short to be called long, more like flaps. My gangly arms, spiky-haired on account of a misunderstanding I had had about shaving and what body parts to apply a razor to, poked through the sleeves/tubes/flaps like prickly noodles. I tucked the shirt into cream-colored shorts with an elastic band. If not for a fresh knee scab, one might not have been able to tell where my pale legs began and the shorts ended. I can still recall Mrs. Pappas going up to a boy named Braden—whose mouth was only capable of one expression, a smirk—and saying, “Try not to laugh.” But I danced anyway. I hung on, like Sloopy.

This is amazing.