From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- What Brenda Lee Wanted - “I Want To Be Wanted”

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Brenda Lee performing her classic heartache song, I Want To Be Wanted.

It’s hard to believe that fifty years later the tune to Brenda Lee’s 1960 classic tear-jerk song, I Want To Be Wanted, is running like some crazy escaped electrode through my head, incessantly through my head. The song’s premise is simple enough. A guy, if you can believe that a 1960s Mad Men in waiting guy could express such sentiments except through some woman fantasy of what a “sensitive” guy would feel when he is dumped (there is no other way to put in 1060. 1560, 2060, 2560), unceremoniously dumped by his sweetie (see I can be nice). So Brother Mopes is all bent out of shape and hardly knows that there is any real world outside his lost, and his pain. He has it so bad for this honey that he can’t even think about some future honey on the horizon taking that old sweetie’s place. Irreplaceable. So he will never be right again when some frail passes him by and gives her come hither smile. Poor guy.

Wait a minute not poor guy, no sap. And also the key to why I am still buzzing the tune through my head fifty years and five hundred come hither looks later (not all by shes, I did some of the come hithering, that is just the, appropriate, total combined). This was my story, hell, half the guys I knew had that same story (although the variety was in what would be missed, missed forever, and it was for the older guys a lot more than some errant kiss).

First to the sap part. There were a million chicks(excuse me, at the time we called dames, what we today with a lot more wisdom, respect and other evil eyes call women, chicks and they liked, some of them anyway, to be called that but that is for some social anthropologist to figure out) out there in the world. And there were at least a few of those millions that a fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, hell, sixty year old boy could latch onto for company to keep away the cold after that theoretical “sweetie” showed him the door. Girls, women, who had many charms, good lips, and who could make my old heart pitter-patter just like the last chick, oops, girl. And unless some dangerous femme fatale, like Jane Greer in Out of The Past or Rita Hayworth in Gilda, has her claws into you bad , which excuses and explained every odd behavior on your part including that grin on your face when she cuts your heart open,
the world should be your oyster. So get over it.


Easy for me to say fifty years later and two years, maybe, smarter about women. But here is the “skinny.” I guess I really was that “sensitive” guy that old Brenda was describing because just about the time her song burst onto the scene, especially as a selection for the last dance of the school dance night I was in the throes of my first love affair (nice way to put it for a fourteen year old guy who wore black Chuck Taylor sneakers, flannel shirts, brown usually, black uncuffed chinos and sunglasses at midnight up in Podunk Maine (Olde Saco to be exact). Ya, heart- be-still as I say her name, Lucy D’Amboise, all of fourteen, had her non-femme fatale claws into me, into me bad after she showed me the door. And immediately took up with bad boy Jimmy LaCroix, Junior.

But time, a little, heals ten percent of all wounds, and so I got over sweet Lucy a while back. But here is the funny part although I found plenty of girl / woman companions that were better kissers, better “caressers,” less two-timing, and just as soft-voiced (although she had one of the softest, most demure voices around) they do not make me think back fifty years to some country torch song. I wonder what Lucy is doing this night.