Shattered Dreams

I actually posted this in my Live Journal but it's more fitting over here.

When I was a kid I always loved the Bacharach song “Do You Know the Way to San José?”. I still dig it, it's a lounge classic, baby.

Now, I was growing up in Scotland, where it was chilly and instead of palm trees we grew thistles and heather and men wore skirts. So I thought San José had to be about the most exotic place known to man, because that song just conjured up images of sunshine and beaches and riding around in convertibles wearing a headscarf, to my little, ideal self, even though it’s actually about going to L.A., working menial, mundane jobs while waiting to be discovered and resulting in broken dreams and a burning desire to return home, in this case, to San José. But its melody, the tempo, the Spanish name just seemed so special. So foreign and tropical and sunny and perfect.

You see, when I was a child, I assumed all of California was like a 1960s, Technicolor “Gidget” beach movie, full of ice cream parlors, bronzed surfer boys who said things like, “Golly gee Susie, you sure look like you need a milkshake!” and, “Silly, girls don’t surf, girls fetch Coca-cola and sit around on the sand and look pretty!” while girls with demi-perms, full-coverage swimwear a nun would approve of - that cinched in their waists like a corset and made their boobs pointy - indeed sat diligently around on the sand looking pretty and beaming Ultrabrite smiles, while Rock or Skip or Bud partook of some wave cruising in some fiendishly unflattering shorts.

Then one day, in the autumn of 1999, I actually did it. I ended up in San José, visiting friends who were living in nearby Mountain View.

And I wanted to stop the nearest pedestrian and ask, “Do you know the way to San Francisco, because San José sucks!”

OK, it didn’t suck per se. It was fine. It was just a regular concrete city. It just wasn’t tropical or exotic in any way and in fact, it looked more like what an ex-coworker of mine back in the UK used to call “San Joe-zay” because she didn’t know any better.

Or maybe she did…