I went to a Tex-Mex place today, called The Highlander, and they had a Garth Brooks album playing in the background. I almost felt I was in Texas again. Schizophrenic as I am, I had the lyrics stuck in my head all day. The song was It's Midnight Cinderella and the lyrics:
I'm Peter, Peter the Pumpkin Eater, and the party's just begun...
Neurotic as I am schizophrenic, I decided to find out what that nursery rhyme means. From Judaism.com...
Peter was a poor man who had an unfaithful wife. She kept cheating on him (couldn’t keep her), so he had to find a way to stop her running around. His solution, fairly common in the middle ages, was a chastity belt (pumpkin shell). For those who don’t know, a chastity belt is roughly a pair of metal underwear with lock and key, so that no one could enter the private region of the woman except whoever held the key, usually her husband. And as the rhyme goes, once he put her in that belt, he kept her very well.
Women!
7 years ago
4 comments:
Schizophrenic or merely neurotic?
Then again, they're by no means mutually exclusive...
That's a crazy story, J. I had no idea it actually MEANT something. Cool. Know any stories behind any other nursery rhymes? I know the Ring around the Rosies story, but do you know any others?
J, Hope your staying sane down there in B. I know it must be hard being away from everything familiar. We miss you! Lora says hi.
I only know the others that were on the Judaism Online website. Most of them you've probably heard or aren't that interesting.
The one that made me laugh was the background of "Rub-a-Dub-Dub": the men apparently were at a side-show, where three women were putting on a show for the audience and these three guys tried to join them in the tub. When you read the real poem it makes more sense.
Suddenly, the "innocence of youth" is a lot risquér than I remember.
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