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[Not Bob]

Originally posted by paigowprincess
Christ, I don't even remember the mom with the screaming kids in the frozen food section part. I thought she was just saying that jetsetting ain all that. I didnt realize this was a self righteous kayaking kinda tune.

I hope RP is not on her way to her.

Well, the screaming kids in the frozen food section is how I imagine it. Anyway, from Lauren Henderson (one of my favorite mystery writers):

• It's one of those songs that stays with you, and there's a very good reason for that. In fact this song is a perfect example of the return of the repressed; or, to put it another way, how a writer's declared intentions can be subverted by the hidden power of their own subtext. 'Never Been To Me' is overtly about how dangerous it is for women to charge around the world following their own selfish pleasures and how much better it is to bite the lip, stay at home and do what nature intended for us to do (breed). That, in any case, is what Ron THINKS he's here to tell us.
  
  Charlene begins by addressing one of the latter type of women, a stay-at-home mother in the middle of a pretty nasty bout of housewife blues.+
  
  "Hey lady, you lady, cursin' at your life.
  You're a discontented mother and a regimented wife
  I've no doubt you dream about the things you'll never do.
  But I wish someone had talked to me like I wanna talk to you."
  
  We will return to the various phrases Charlene uses to describe the pissed-off homemaker later. But let us look first at the way she tries to convince the POH that the latter has made the right choice in life:
  
  "Oh, I've been to Nice and the Isles of Greece where I sipped champagne on a yacht.
  Moved like Harlow in Monte Carlo and showed 'em what I got.
  I've been undressed by kings and I've seen some things that a woman ain't s'posed to see.
  I've been to Paradise but I've never been to me."
  
  That the POH hasn't brained Charlene with a baby stroller by this point shows considerable restraint. There is nothing worse than someone who's had the kind of good time you haven't telling you it wasn't worth it after all, like supermodels complaining that they only get offered bimbo parts in movies. When Helena Bonhan Carter moaned in a Time Out interview that she always got the boring heroines and would love to play character roles, Kathy Burke wrote a famously blistering letter to Time Out pointing out that, as a self-proclaimed ugly cow, she wouldn't at all have minded Helena's dilemma. The more Charlene bangs on about having been undressed by kings, the more it makes any self-respecting POH desperate to shoot off to the Riviera and flaunt herself in a string bikini in the hope that some monarch with time on his hands will immediately summon her to his yacht and start peeling the macramé two-piece off her with his teeth.

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