Hello

Hi. I'm Komera. I'm a Scorpio, and my favorite ice cream is french vanilla. Oh, we don't ask those kinds of questions here? Oops.

Okay, let me start over.

Hello. I'm Komera. Illustrator and aspiring writer. I've been shadowing the board for a while now, although there's a good chance I won't post often because I have a okay-what-are-you-doing-now preteen and a hey-get-out-of-that toddler. 'Nuff said?

Only in the earlier of my memories can I remember a time without having heard of the Beach Boys. The earliest I can recall having a feeling that I had at least heard of them, even if I knew nothing else of them, was kindergarten. (I was a kindergartener starting in '83. In retrospect, it's not hard to figure out why I would have suddenly heard about them then.) By the time I was a 1st grader the following year, I definitely had the sense that they were Americana, and most definitely red, white, and blue. So anyone with any amount of patriotism (and elementary school kids are fully loaded with patriotism) liked the Beach Boys. Now ifs, ands, or buts.

Fast forward to mid school. I finally got to listen to some of their songs on a regular basis: in the form of my older sister's cassette tape. Ah, those were good times, sitting by my sister and listening with her to her rather small collection of tapes. Grease music track. Olivia Newton-John. Footloose music track. The Beach Boys. She took the tapes with her on our trip to Thailand. Now there's an odd memory to envision: sitting in a small room, inside a mosquito net, in a row of "apartments" on stilts over water, listening to the Beach Boys on a small portable cassette player. The band was firmly planted in my mind as being decades old, although I wasn't yet sure if they were a 50s band or a 60s band. Later that very same year, a rather nice tropical sounding song started playing on the radio during bus trips to and from school each day. Wait a minute, that was the Beach Boys? They're STILL AROUND? GWAAAA! I had no idea they were still together! What have they been doing between the 50s/60s and Kokomo?

Kids are still patriots, although their vision is starting to pick up shades of grey. My image of the super clean, red, white, and blue Beach Boys was shattered by a TV retrospective. You mean they weren't always red, white, and blue? They wore... lumberjack shirts? GASP! They fought? They weren't perfect? Wait, there was sex and drugs??? THEY WERE REAL PEOPLE? Huh

CHILDHOOD RUINED!!!!!!

And then I watched "Summer Dreams", yeah, that thing. As far as school went, I was a pretty smart kid. Picking up on the nuances of social interactions? Blockhead. The subtler parts of movies and books regularly passed me by. (I've gotten better, I swear!) Most of "Summer Dreams" failed to check in with me, and having gone back to watch it decades later, I can see why it failed to make much of an impression on me. It seems to have been made for people who already knew what was going on back then, not for people like I was who knew nothing about them. But what I did get out of it was there were three brothers (I didn't even pick up on one of them being a cousin!), and one of them was a music genius. There was a mean daddy who knew music but was too inflexible and old fashioned. Something about fighting on a plane. And some record executive (wow, I completely mis-remembered this scene!) questioning the band about animal sounds on a record when they were stoned. Aside from that, I didn't understand it. And what I don't understand, I tend to forget. Needless to say, I promptly forgot most of it.

That's the way things stood until I was studying in the Art Institute. Neck deep in six hundred different ways to make a pretty picture, I didn't spare much though for anything I heard on the news. I do quite clearly recall hearing of one passing from cancer. Aw. So sad. I did so like listening to their songs from my sister's cassette. But old guys do die, fact of life. (This thought shows I still hadn't made up my mind if they were a 50s or a 60s band. If I could only go back in time and kick myself for that though!) His name? Uh... something. Fine detailed work with exacto knives require concentration. Would rather not bleed over my homework.

I didn't think of them again until '14. My first child's homework frequently has pun-ny titles. The title of his science homework about sound waves? "Good Vibrations". "Mom, why are you face palming?" So I hopped over to YouTube and my son got to hear the Beach Boys for the first time. Thank you, my dear son's homework. Now the Beach Boys is fresh in my mind. Y'know what? I don't have to sit in ignorance anymore. I can go visit Wiki and read up on them! God bless the internet, my life would be so much more shallow without it. All those things I had heard about over the years and forgotten, now with an "oh yeah, I forgot about that!" Oh, so it wasn't just brothers? There's a cousin in there, too? Oh yeah, they were red, white, and blue, once. Oh dear gaaaawwwd, Carl wasn't that old? Only a few months older than my own father? Now I feel stupid. Stupid stupid stupid! Huh? There was a second biopic? Oh yeah, that's right. VH1 did relentlessly air something about the Beach Boys, but I never did go watch it. Let's go watch that! Not sure if I should feel better or more stupid for having watched it, though. Hey, let's go find some pictures! Oooooh, lots of pictures! What is this Smiley Smile board that most of these pictures seem to be sitting on?

And thus, I'm here. It's a long "hello, I'm new" message, but hopefully I've entertained you guys for a few minutes.

The Smiley Smile Message Board