Cell Phone Serenade

The first time I heard this song was a cold, slow night in Ellwood City, PA. I was visiting a summer camp I had worked at for years and years. It was a kind of reunion weekend where the staff would get together to catch up a few months after the summer had ended and everyone would have broken up with their summer lover by that point and was infinitely more interested in school or work than they were in hanging out with their camp friends.

There was a series of games and I won, along with some close friends, a deck of playing cards, a set of scented candles, some dominoes, a bottle of sparkling apple cider, and some chocolates. The camp director's wife won my pack of half-smoked cigarettes in a chicken mcnuggets box. She had not won a sense of humor, though, and threw it out. Anyhow. My friends and I played dominoes and poker until four o'clock of the morning, drinking apple cider, and pouring candle wax over everything. It was great fun.

Then we retired to our camp cots, way past ready for bed.

It was at this time that my friend got out his new cell phone that played MP3s. This was like days after the technology had been introduced and I-Phones were way down the road, and a camera on your phone was still hotness. He turned up "You're Beautiful" as loud as the raspy little speakers could play and began to sing along with Mr. Blunt while all of us tried to sleep. Everyone was throwing stuff at him and telling him to shut up, but he wouldn't. He didn't sleep. He just kept telling us how beautiful we all were.

The next time I saw one of the commercials for those cell phones, I was so agitated that I don't think I got any sleep that night, either. And when radio and televsion and my grandparents picked up on "You're beautiful" it would remind me of that night full of sparkling apple cider and cell phone serenades.