Pat, What Were You Thinking?
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I was indulging my penchant for eighties rock the other day when I came across my Pat Benatar album. Excited, I put on the record and began to dance crazily; pumping my arms and kicking my feet, to her massive hit “Love is a Battlefield”. It struck me mid kick that Pat has so idea what the hell she’s talking about. “Battlefield” makes me think of men all lined up in perfect rows, shooting point blank at each other. That’s love? To me, the only kind of battlefield love could possibly be must involve trenches. Every relationship I’ve been in involved two parties inching towards each other, digging themselves into holes until there’s only 100 yards separating them and no one can move unless they want to risk major casualty. I don’t think that’s what Pat was going for.
So, I’ve decided to do Pat a favor and devise the “Ultimate Metaphor for Love”. The “Ultimate Metaphor for Love” is none other than the board game Mousetrap. Back in the good old days (the early 90s) my brother and I used to play Mousetrap. I use the term “play” loosely because anyone who’s played Mousetrap knows the real fun is setting up the trap. My brother and I never actually got around to playing the game. We would sit for hours, meticulously piecing together the contraption. We would work slowly, talking clearly so as not to avoid confusion. We would share the effort of building equally until finally we had this amazing, complicated, shoddy looking trap. Now came the moment of truth, setting off the trap. Secretly, we both were dying to set off the trap first. We would have given a kidney to just make the move and get to the exciting part. However, with the thrill of setting off the trap came the risk. The trap was cheap plastic and most of the time setting it off resulted in its own immediate destruction. Neither my brother nor I wanted that kind of responsibility. So we would tiptoe around the trap, letting our hands get near and then retracting them. Finally, one of us would get so frustrated with anticipation that they would set off the trap. And it would break. My brother and I would yell at each other, claiming that it was the other’s fault for some mishap that had occurred during the construction process. There would be tears and words we didn’t mean and finally we would each storm off and play with someone else. Does everyone see the connection between love and Mousetrap? Yes, it’s genius. I’m aware.
So Pat, you have it all wrong. That’s ok though, I don’t think they had Mousetrap back in your day anyway. Besides, what everyone really loves about your song is the little shimmy you did in your video. It would be hard to shimmy to a song about Mousetrap.
Heather Hadar Sayfan still plays Mousetrap, also, Connect Four.