SHOUT: To raise one's voice above room temperature

I'm a little freaked out. Wedding Crashers is on. I've never seen the movie before, because, to be honest, I'd rather have food poisoning. But it's on CBS tonight and I can't reach the remote, so in lieu of a real life and, while checking my email, I started watching it.

However, it's not the movie itself that got my freak on. Or Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, who are pretty damn funny actually. And kinda cute in a far-too-young-for-me-anymore so-give-it-a-rest way.

Nope, I'm freaked because Owen and Vince are in the movie at a reception they've crashed, dancing with a hundred other people to SHOUT. Holy crap?!! to quote syndicated television icon, Frank Barone. SHOUT -- the national anthem of weddings, bar mitzvahs, frat parties, oldies stations, drunken sex, and kaoroke bars just before closing.

SHOUT was the soundtrack of my early college years.The soundtrack of my post college years. The soundtrack of the stain remover I used during my childraising years. The soundtrack of every Christmas party at every job I had. The soundtrack of summers on the beach. The actual soundtrack of the Animal House soundtrack.

That tune has had more lives than Regis Philbin. Here it is, November, 2008 and I'm hearing it again. Do the math. It's been forty-seven years. And tonight, for some reason, it's giving me flashbacks.

Fall of 1961, I'm twisting to SHOUT at a freshman college mixer in the Delta Tau Delta quad, when, suddenly, all eyes are looking way up at something behind me. I turn, mid-twist, and see my very first hairy arsed moon with full cheeks flapping out of somebody's dorm window.

You make me wanna SHOUT.

Spring of 1962, I'm twisting to SHOUT again because I have yet to realize that this tune is the only one I'm going to hear for the next forty years. Meanwhile, I'm out with a guy who ends up dating my roommate at the same time he's going out with me, then dumps me and marries her for 25 years.

You make me wanna SHOUT.

Summer of 1978. Animal House is at the local cinema in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware. I'm fresh off the divorce wagon with two kids and no job. My first pair of Nike waffle trainers is giving me shin splints, and I voluntarily pay two bucks to see the Isley Brothers preserved forever on celluloid along with John Belushi's acting.

You make me wanna SHOUT.

Sometime in the 90's. I am working at an ad agency. A creative director gives me an assignment to come up with ways to freshen the campaign for SHOUT stain remover. Clearly I'm being used as a test case for "bad karma."

You make me wanna SHOUT.

November, 2008. Despite all my efforts to never watch the Wedding Crashers, it manages to worm its way into my home, only to suddenly surprise me in a bad way with a bigass singing and dancing number to -- OH NO!!! SHOUT.

Has my life come full circle? Or is it just circling the drain?

This makes me wanna puke.

One forty year observation: nobody dances to SHOUT doing the twist anymore. Not because the twist isn't a perfectly acceptable dance at a middle class white high school reunion. But these days the movement of choice is performed by having all present stand together hip to hip, sweating profusely with arms raised, while jumping up and down higher and higher during the song, until someone falls and gets stomped to death.

I can hope, can't I?