"Solitaire" by Laura Branigan

1983 / #7

Rate Your Music score: 3.12 out of 5!

Whooooo, man!

You know exactly where this is headed, don't you?

As I've stated before, a top 10 hit shouldn't be lost. But the AM radio in the Horizon was still mostly pasted to the MOR mainstays of the era. My folks had only recently discovered that you didn't need a special permit to add WCLU to the presets, and old habits die hard. So "Solitaire" never felt like a #7.

With a title like "Solitaire", it's just too obvious where this is going. It sounds like one of these sayings we had a few years later in high school art class. The teacher would often just up and disappear for 40 minutes at a time. He'd suddenly announce he was going to his office, which was in another building. Then we didn't see him again until class was almost over.

In the meantime, people would be asking, "Where is he?"

One of the responses was, "Probably playing solitaire."

But there was no mention of a deck of 51 or Captain Kangaroo, much to the Statler Brothers' chagrin.

While the teacher was out of the room, we kept hitting the ceiling with a broom handle and yelling, "Boist!" so the classrooms upstairs could hear us. People kept farting really loud too. One time, a classmate farted, and somebody replied, "That sounded important." One other time, someone farted, and somebody responded, "Thanks for the news, Dan Rather."

The "Solitaire" video is amusing too. In that clip, Laura Branigan displays the utterly mature trick of holding up a deck of cards and bending them so they fly all over the room. When I was growing up, I was taught this valuable trick by a neighborhood teenager. It takes skill. Laura's technique was different though in that she bent the cards backward instead of forward. I always thought forward had funnier results.

Sadly, Laura died of a cerebral aneurysm in 2004. What Wikipedia calls an "age controversy" then emerged. At the time, her age was reported to be 47. It wasn't until 12 years later - in 2016 - that the Associated Press and other news outlets issued a correction. It was only then that they discovered she was actually 52.