They had a giant garage sale to help fund my son’s eighth grade class trip to Washington. I hate garage sales —and friends this was the mother of all garage sales, featuring an entire school gym brimming with crap. Near the end, one of the organizers handed me a bag and told me to throw away anything that looked like garbage. “It all looks like garbage,” I replied.
She took away my bag.
All garbage except for one thing: a vinyl copy of Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
As a boy I spent many hours listening to Herb Alpert and gazing at the cover of Whipped Cream. To a sixth grader who was feeling the first stirrings of manhood, there was nothing more erotic than that album cover. I remember bringing it to school in a brown paper bag and letting my friends peak at it.
Naturally, when I spotted it at the garage sale I had to have it. I tucked it away in a secret place -much as I did at twelve-years-old-Â and I was finally reunited with my boyhood love. Kids have all sorts of things to stimulate their imagination these days, so to them it would sound nutty to say I was obsessed with this picture.
It turns out that the model, Dolores Erickson, was three months pregnant during the photo shoot. I’m not sure how I would have felt about that at 12 —but I will say this: A CD of Whipped Cream would not have had nearly the same impact. And an MP3? None at all.