Pleasure Principled

Revealingly Articulate Idol Worship

Choosing one’s idol – although it may seldom feel like a choice – is a very personal matter, and not susceptible to easy explanation. It could even be said that part of the glory of having an idol lies in the not-explaining, the sense of some dark and cupboard-like part of the universe that belongs privately only to you, the idol in question and the way your two lives meet, which, since it is almost by definition not a physical meeting, requires, all the more, Gnostic faculties existing beyond the realm of vocal expression in this world of an aesthetically bankrupt demiurge. Another word for idol, after all, is ‘icon’ – this being a religious image that serves to transmit the mystery of faith in ways that language cannot. Holy relics may come in the form of posters, CDs, records, signed photographs, items of clothing and so on.

For some purists, the word ‘idol’ is forever struck into a stone tablet in katakana, as ‘aidoru‘, and the implication is that there are certain mysteries of aidoru-worship that cannot be translated into a non-Japanese context. Non-Japanese, or certainly, non-Asian pop divas and pin-ups can never be aidoru, even if, to some benighted souls, they are, by some peculiar interpretation of the word, idols. However, I see no reason not to follow the spirit of aidoru-worship – if one is inclined – rather than the kana of it. Purism, after all, is often inclined to lean on sophistry and fallacy, and Japanese religion has long been syncretistic. Think, for instance, of the British pop duo, Shampoo, reputed to have been taken to the Japanese bosom largely because of a serendipitous resemblance to manga characters and general Hello Kitty sensibility, and who were held to that bosom long after their pan had flashed in their homeland. Ponder the fact that the trademark blepharoplastic eyes of manga and anime characters were first introduced to Japanese culture by Tezuka Osamu, who was much influenced in using such features by his love of Disney animation. Then contemplate, if you will, Magibon, the winsome blepharoplastic pixie of YouTube, mistaken often by the ignorant for a Japanese girl, although she is North American by birth and blood, and whose name, of course, is a portmanteau formed from a kana version of ‘Maggie’ and the ‘bon’ of Morning Musume’s Aibon. Dig a little beneath the surface, and such cultural miscegenation is revealed as far from rare. Influences are frequently undeclared, and when cultural genealogies are uncovered, so, too, is the true prevalence and fertility of interbreeding.

With our pantheon of the possible enlarged by such meditations, perhaps we are ready for comparative religion and bracing vistas of the ecumenical. A philosophical stroll through the pantheon’s passages will show that the idols in the alcoves are, indeed, myriad. Under this single roof, perhaps we will begin to feel that polytheism, polymorphous as it may be, is not necessarily perverse, or, if it is, then only in a good way.

However, in order to illustrate the advantages of a broad and varied church, it is not my intention to enumerate the wealth of idols upon whose feet the brow – or lips, or tongue – may rest, according to mood, but to halt, like a museum tour guide, before one alcove in particular, and offer an example of what the choice of the idol within implies.

And here we are. Please take a moment to peer beneath the stone arch. An impossible hairdo, almost poodle-like, billowing and curling from the head as the waves around the shell of Botticelli’s Venus (or, come to think of it, perhaps more like the shell itself), a white prom dress that fortifies the breasts with Fifties angularity and blooms from the waist with summery simplicity, white gloves, as of a cartoon mouse, which anticipate also Michael Jackson, and soft Italian features in the face of the kind of girl that a boy would take home to meet his mother, if indeed, he were lucky enough – it is none other than Annette Funicello.

Why choose such an idol as this? To answer that question I must first examine a truth not sufficiently acknowledged, that may to some even seem counter-intuitive, crackpot, heretical, or far too obvious. I have hinted at it already. The sacred paradox in this truth means that many prefer it to be left half-hidden, or not spoken aloud. The truth is this – the attraction of the idol is its inaccessibility. As nuns are brides of Christ, so we are all, in a sense, distant suitors to our idols. We are vestal virgins or eunuchs, chaste in our devotion, but no less passionate for that. Like so much that is part of faith, this at first appears foolishness, and its wisdom is only revealed when it is turned inside out, within the heart of the believer. In our very distance lies an unsullied intimacy not found in the fleshly relationships of gain and loss that otherwise occupy our lives.

Annette Funicello may be the idol of a receding age, but properly viewed, this only adds another dimension of sanctifying distance to Her relationship with the faithful. She is distant not only in space, but, as manifest to us in her screen and singing career, also in time. To pursue one’s suit, already hopeless, over the chasm of time, is the truest of all leaps of faith, and in direct proportion to its foolishness, so are its rewards great.

Let us look at the circumstances of Our Annette’s life. By such astrology we may see her relationship to the more recently discovered stars, and perhaps trace patterns to map the heavens.

Annette Funicello came to this world in 1942, on October the 22^nd, through a portal that opened for that purpose in Utica, New York, and was given into the care of Italian-American parents. If she showed from her earliest years signs of that for which she was destined, then such signs have not been recorded in great detail. Jesus, we are told, went missing at the age of twelve, only to be found in the temple at Jerusalem, explaining to his earthly parents that this was his “father’s house”. The tradition concerning Our Annette is that she first took dancing lessons at the age of five, because her mother believed this would help her overcome shyness. We see here already what may have become two opposing forces in her nature – the shyness that would give her bearing such attractive modesty in later years, and the discipline that enabled her to overcome that shyness so that she was able to carry her modesty into the public eye. At the age of twelve she was discovered by Walt Disney himself while dancing the part of the Swan Queen in a recital of Swan Lake. Disney was then recruiting talented youngsters for a new television show called The Mickey Mouse Club. Annette was the last of these ‘Mouseketeers’ to be recruited, and the only one chosen by Walt Disney personally. And so the star of destiny ascended. As if it were Annette, the last-chosen Mouseketeer, who truly completed the show, her fan mail soon showed her to be also the most popular. If I may allow myself a Gnostic statement here, why this should be so seems plain enough, though it is something I have yet to see explained; the closest I can come at this stage is to say that within her very modesty there lay a star quality that was unmistakable. Her shyness nurtured natural mystery – the mystery of the girl next door.

Annette considered herself first and foremost a dancer. Dancing, that most expressive and least conceptual of all the arts, was what she most loved, but was not, finally, that for which she was most famous, and here, too, perhaps, can be detected something of the Annette mystery. That her greatest love, the core of her being, you might say, was something that remained a little in the shade, as if protected, gives a glimpse of a vulnerable ‘real person’. Paradoxically, the fact that this ‘real person’ remained slightly to one side, or in the shadows, when Annette was engaged in the singing and acting careers for which she became better known – the singing and acting careers about which she was always so modest – only lends those superficially superficial careers a greater sense of ‘reality’, or authenticity, as if they are cast by their dancing shadow.

When I say that Annette was modest about her acting and singing careers, I don’t mean that she was modest simply on a verbal level. Particularly with regard to her singing, it was apparently a career she embarked upon accidentally, even unwillingly. Her acting career, of course, grew out of her role as a Mouseketeer, and her singing career, in turn – and very early on – grew out of her acting career. Annette herself explained the mysterious way in which destiny worked in an interview:

I got started as a singer really quite by accident. I was doing one of the serials for The Mickey Mouse Club called The Annette Show, and I played a little country farm girl, and the Sherman Brothers wrote a song for me to be sung on the hayride, to be laughed at, actually, and it was called How Will I Know My Love?, and, after the show aired, I remember Walt Disney came to me one day and he said, “We’ve got to put this out on a single. We’re getting fan letters like crazy. Kids want to buy it.” And I said, “I don’t sing. I’m sorry.” He said, “Well, I’m signing you to a recording contract, young lady. You’re singing!” And I said, “Yes, Sir.” And that’s really what started my singing career.

How Will I Know My Love? was released in 1956. Her recording career was to continue until 1964, with the release of the LP Annette at Bikini Beach, and beyond, miscellaneous releases being made up to 1967, on singles, compilations and so on. After the late Sixties there followed a hiatus, with Annette’s musical swansong – Annette Funicello Country Album – coming in 1984. Between 1956 and 1984, with songs being written for Annette by such names as the Sherman Brothers and Paul Anka, her many releases, largely on the Buena Vista label, included the likes of Italiannette (1960), Hawaiiannette (1960), Dance Annette (1961) and Story of My Teens (1962).

Being a protégée of Disney in this way, and making the transition from child star, under Disney’s mentoring, to adult star of screen and recording studio, gives Annette special interest as a figure standing at the beginning of a line of such stars, their primogenitor, perhaps. She could be seen as grandmother to Miley Cyrus, whose showbiz mother, one might say, is Britney Spears. Tellingly, and perhaps inevitably, these three also have in common a public concern about the extent to which their sexuality should be on display. Britney Spears, for instance, despite protestations that she does not consider herself “raunchy”, has made appeals to the libido from her very first hit, in the video to which she set the tone for her career by dressing in a schoolgirl uniform, surely not accidentally establishing the tension between sex and innocent wholesomeness that defines her appeal. She has also ’shocked’ some – or at least, the media hopes that we are shocked – by forcing a defenceless paparazzo to take a picture of her genitalia as she climbed from a car. In the case of Miley Cyrus, there was the Annie Leibovitz photo-shoot, criticised for being exploitative, and part of a trend in the media of sexualising stars – and girls generally – at a younger and younger age. Perhaps the taboo surrounding Annette’s sexuality was such that, in a very Fifties way, it remained largely unspoken and unwritten. One tribute website informs us, without providing the statistics to back up the assertion, but with retrospective, and not especially far-fetched knowing, that:

Over the next three years [after becoming the 24^th and last Mouseketeer], her supple dancer’s body blossomed into womanhood, triggering hormone attacks in pubescent boys all over the country! Millions tuned in every afternoon for the free lessons in feminine anatomy that Annette unwittingly provided.

The concern surrounding Our Annette’s sexuality, however, is perhaps best typified by a rather odd, understated and amusing piece of folklore (the hard facts of which are hard to ascertain) that promises to retain the power of fascination long after the ’scandals’ surrounding Britney and Miley have been shrugged off with a “So what?”

From 1963, Annette was to star in a series of films for American International Pictures set in the milieu of the teen surf culture of the time. The first of these was Beach Party. This, of course, was the early Sixties, and the series is, in its naïve way, a celebration of the sexual revolution (which, as Larkin will tell you, began in 1963). However, although she starred in these films, and was surrounded by a supporting cast of bikini-clad babes, the camera was always used with greater reserve in relation to Our Annette than to the girls in her vicinity. It was never Our Annette’s rear that the camera followed in close-up along the shoreline. Moreover, Annette’s character, Dee Dee, made it quite clear that she would not satisfy boyfriend Frankie’s libidinous desires until after the two of them were bound in matrimony. Nevertheless, Our Annette was to appear more-or-less ’scantily clad’, that is, in such swimwear as a young, attractive and hip star of her status would be expected to appear on a beach at the time. No doubt it was this ambiguity that apparently prompted the still-protective Walt Disney to attempt the enforcement of a precaution designed to minimise that ambiguity decisively in favour of respectability. He extracted from Annette a promise not to expose her navel on camera. What is the cultural meaning of an exposed navel? So runs the eternal question.

Whatever the nature of the promise or assurance that Disney allegedly wrung from Annette, the anti-navel rule was in force for the first film in the series only. In Beach Muscle Party (1964) her midriff is left exposed by a two-piece fishnet bathing suit and in Bikini Beach (1964), the navel is once more free of its abdominal purdah, being plainly visible for a significant number of seconds in an early scene. Under the circumstances, one has to admire Disney’s Zen-like craft in placing a taboo on the belly-button rather than some other part of the anatomy. Once the harmless navel taboo was broken, Annette was sexually liberated and there was no need for further liberation, which fact has perhaps ensured that her mystique remains intact in a way that it certainly is not for Britney Spears. Were Britney’s exposed pudenda in some way born out of Annette Funicello’s immaculate belly-button? This is a question on which one can only speculate, and endlessly speculate. However, aesthetically and philosophically – if not culturally – the belly-button legend seems to stand in the same relation to the exposed vulva scandal as one of Lafcadio Hearn’s collected Japanese fairy tales does to the film Saw V. The former might seem tame, fragmentary, and barely even there, but it retains some charm and mystery, whatever (and who knows?) it actually means. This, naturally, is another advantage with regard to the necessary distance of the idol. Overtly erotic manifestations do not necessarily dissipate this numinous distance, and may increase it. There is also to be considered that an idol too remote may become little more than a rumour, or less. However, the point may be readily understood that an idol is easily cheapened by too much exposure. On the spectrum of elusiveness and exposure, Annette flits towards the extreme end of the former, a fairytale Japanese butterfly.

In her cultural and chronological precedence to the likes of Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus lies a great deal – though by no means all – of Our Annette’s attraction as an idol, as well as her resemblance to aidoru such as the members of Morning Musume, Berryz Koubou and so on. It is partly the almost archaeological attraction of tracing present phenomena back to past influences. If one refers to “the great grand-daddy of them all” (though grandmother, of course, and as mentioned, is more appropriate here) the suggestion is of a being larger in size, scope, power and so on. After all, as branches ramify they become smaller, ending in mere twigs. (On the other hand, you may hold to a perspective best expressed by a different analogy – that a stream starts small, and, after it is joined by other tributaries, swells in size until it reaches the ocean.) While it is mainly a question of taste as to whether one thinks the ancestor or the scion is the better example of the type, there is surely always a satisfaction in knowing the origin of a thing?

One may be impressed as a connoisseur of cheesecake art by the mixture of innocence and sultriness in the surviving pin-up images of Bettie Page, and, comparing them to the current pin-up ephemera, find them to be striking in their timelessness. Surely Bettie Page marked a transition between sexual repression and liberation, one might reflect wonderingly. But this small revolution looms large because it is still near. Go back and you may discover there were sex symbols before Bettie Page, and may even find yourself committed to what had previously been a heresy – that the sexual presence of, say, Louise Brooks, was both more intense and more over-archingly timeless in its appeal. And then you may go back again – to Mata Hari. Similarly, you may have installed, in your private alcove, Cassandra Peterson’s Elvira, before replacing this idol with Carolyn Jones, as Morticia Addams, then Maila Nurmi as Vampira. You have traced the Amazon to its source. (Though there are always strange and complicating factors such as Maila Nurmi’s apparent influence from the original Addams Family comic strip.)

And so it is with Annette Funicello. Though there are precedents even to origins, depending on one’s definitions, Annette was the first of a particular kind of star. We may have to be careful in narrowing the parameters of the definition to be sure of this (if necessary, we can narrow it to the first child star to appear in The Mickey Mouse Club and go on to have a successful music career), but I won’t trouble to enumerate such parameters here – only to explore those of immediate interest to us. The first of these, and possibly the most significant, is that she grew up in the public eye, under the wing of an orchestrating svengali/impresario figure. And it must be this fact which made possible that embracing possessive – Our Annette – which has become customary in referring to her. She is ours in the way that a child in the family is ours. She is ours, also, because we feel protective towards her, as is only proper. The child star, of course, then becomes an adult, who is still Our Annette, because we have watched her grow and have grown with her. We may still feel protective towards her – who is not protective of their idols? – but now we are also apt to shelter under her wing as she once sheltered under Disney’s – to shelter under her greater wing – and so she becomes Our Annette in a different sense, for here is the very bosom of our church.

Surely this same mixture of protectiveness and sheltered worship is to be seen in many of the aidoru cults, and, in the case of Hello! Project and other such religious cells, because of comparable factors in their history and formation. Before tracing the connection, or at least similarities, between Annette Funicello and Hello! Project, however, it might be worth mentioning that there is a very literal link between Our Annette and Japanese aidoru in that her hit song, Pineapple Princess (1960), written by the Sherman Brothers, and also, incidentally, her own favourite of all her songs, was recorded in Japan by Tashiro Midori in 1961, and also, I believe, by the Chinese-born actress and singer Matsushima Tomoko, facts that may suggest intriguing avenues of exploration for those in search of ecstatic vistas of the ephemeral or obscure.

I would like now to turn, for my main link between Annette and aidoru, to the Onyanko Club, a group of schoolgirls (with, over the course of its lifespan, “52 official members and three unofficial members”) who were assembled in the Eighties for their own television show and a recording career. There is the obvious comparison to be made here between Yuuyake Nyan Nyan (Sunset Meow, the television show in question) and The Mickey Mouse Club (incidentally, ‘Onyanko Club’ means ‘Kitten Club’). Both shows were intended to provide wholesome family entertainment by assembling young talent, and talent with something of the ordinary, that is to say, the ‘girl next door’, about it. One significant difference, though, is that there was apparently less of the accident of destiny about the music careers of the members of Onyanko Club. Annette, of course, was a solo musical artiste, having attained the position serendipitously through The Mickey Mouse Club independently of the Club’s other members. All the members of the Onyanko Club, however, were, from the beginning, chosen in part as recording artists, too.

Apart from youth and the ‘manufactured’ element of their stardom, perhaps the mouse/kitten connection best typifies what Annette and Onyanko had in common – ‘kawaii‘, or ‘cute’. If this has become so predominant in contemporary Japanese culture through manga and anime, which were Disney-influenced, and if Annette and the likes of Onyanko Club seem to share a measure of kawaii, then perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest that, in terms of cultural genealogy, Annette and Onyanko Club are related through Walt Disney and Tezuka Osamu.

In the next decade, modelled on the Onyanko Club phenomenon, masterminded by the aidoru answer to Walt Disney, Tsunku, there came Hello! Project and the various girl groups under its umbrella, most significantly Morning Musume and Berryz Koubou. If I may recapitulate what I wrote concerning the implications of the possessive, ‘Our Annette’, and apply it to the attitudes of the wota associated with these groups, the mixed protectiveness and worship relates to the fact that the various members of the groups – some more than others – grow up in public, negotiating, on camera, the difficult path from innocence to maturity, in the midst of this vulnerability being both ordinary and immaculate, familiar and distant, sacred and silly, awe-inspiring and humble.

The sense of protectiveness that is part of the wota’s worship is very important. We have already seen how the innocence-to-maturity path sets up contradictory or ambiguous expectations surrounding the sexuality of idol or aidoru. Though this contradictory element may be more pronounced with the American idols, it is still discernible, I think, in the aidoru. As Kago Ai and Tsuji Nozomi, two of the most kawaii of all aidoru, sing in Robo Kiss:

Itsu made mo kodomo ja nai no ne.

(You can’t stay a child forever, right?)

In the same song are other protests, similar in nature:

Koi gurai shitte te touzen.

(Naturally, I know about love.)

And:

Kisu ha wakaru wa.

(Of course I know about kissing.)

When aidoru ‘come out’ in this way, sexually, they may, of course, by criticised or abused, perhaps in the media, or perhaps simply by people you know, as ‘cheap’, or other things less pleasant to mention. The protective faithful will always defend against accusations that the aidoru are bimbos, fembots, fallen women, floozies, hussies and so on, and, although there may be a suspicion in such defence that the faithful are ‘in denial’, the attitude is, nonetheless, gallant and commendable. There lies within it somewhere an inarticulate reverence for one significant source of the power of a goddess – sexuality. The unbeliever, of course, will attempt to desecrate this same source of power. The faithful, while almost seeming to avert eyes in an I-dare-not-look-upon-the-face-of-the-living-god-nor-speak-her-sacred-name manner, will instinctively guard against such desecration, as is meet and good, though they may also go into the very adytum of the temple to know those mysteries that should not be sullied by the mouths of unbelievers. In other words, for the faithful there is no angel/whore dichotomy. Even a glimpse behind the temple veil does not transform the angel into a whore. When the mysteries are properly approached, the angel remains an angel.

Another of the parameters by which we might define the similarities between Annette and certain Japanese aidoru is related to the previously mentioned ‘girl next door’ aspect of Annette’s fame. Tsunku’s choice of Morning Musume members, for instance, has about it something of the spirit, also, in which Annette Funicello was scouted and groomed for stardom by Walt Disney. For one thing, the original line-up of Morning Musume consisted of girls who had been rejected in a talent competition. They were not necessarily the most technically or conventionally talented candidates that could have been chosen, and yet Tsunku had a keen eye for girls who would somehow win the affection of fans, and through that affection – the possessive and protective relationship – blossom into stars. The Onyanko Club before them, too, had an ‘amateur’ aesthetic perhaps derived from the ‘audition’ way in which the group was formed, not dissimilar in spirit (only more calculated) to Walt Disney’s discovery of Annette at a school recital. The constantly changing line-ups of both Onyanko Club and Morning Musume helped ensure that this amateur aesthetic did not pale or founder, since, in the case that one particular calculation of serendipity was ill-judged, there would always be another along in a minute. Even the possibility of misjudgement added something to the appeal of these groups, since it encouraged the fan to choose and support favourites. What could be more essential to a ‘girl next door’ aesthetic than the possibility of failure (the failure, for instance, of the original members of Morning Musume in the talent contest)? A girl failing to be special, in this aesthetic, makes her appear, to some eyes and depending on the girl and the failure, more special.

I hope I have made a reasonable case for the ways in which Our Annette was the precedent of present-day aidoru. I would now like to talk a little about the more exclusive benefits that accrue to those who kneel at Our Annette’s pedestal – benefits that might not accrue to the faithful who know only the idols of our present aeon. One such benefit is rarity, and it is a benefit well-understood by the pilgrim. To comprehend what is sacred, it is sometimes necessary that the journey to attain it is a hard one. In our age of convenience, pilgrimage is rarely embarked upon, and the revelations it brings are granted to fewer and fewer faithful as a result. However, holy relics related to Our Annette are not for sale at every street corner and market stall. Her records are no longer for sale new on vinyl, or, for the most part, compact disc. Downloads, of course, may be available, but for some this is an intangible form of worship, and for others, it might be seen to cheapen the pilgrimage (for me, it is also simply a world I don’t inhabit… yet?). If one eschews downloads (admittedly an eccentric attitude these days) then Our Annette’s music must be caught in glimpses here and there, like a vision granted – on YouTube, for instance – and then snatched away, leading you on in your footsore pilgrimage with nothing but the memory of the signs you have known, and the faith in your heart. There are various objects answering the purpose of Holy Grail, in quest of which you may go. Some of these are easier to obtain than others. A brief survey, at the time of writing, of Annette Funicello-related items on Amazon shows us the DVD of Beach Party and Bikini Beach (a double-sided DVD), the autobiography, A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes, sets of publicity photographs, a compact disc of The Best of Annette, etc. Dig a little deeper, with specific searches, and you may find, for instance, Annette: A Musical Reunion with America’s Girl Next Door, a CD boxed set mentioned in the inner notes of The Best of Annette, or, with “no image available”, Hawaiiannette, for $29.99 at the cheapest: “Super rare original lp on Buena Vista label. Amazing recordings that will ALWAYS sound better on original vinyl!” A three-handed battle goes on in my breast between disappointment that it is available on the Internet at all, gladness that, after all, I do not necessarily have to depend upon the whims of fate, and calculation as to whether I should buy it in my current full recession mode, without knowing whether I have steady access to a record-player.

It has to be said that even the above, on present reflection, does not entirely dissipate my sense of pilgrimage, not when I consider that – as an example – at one stop on my pilgrimage, in a record shop in Chicago, I enquired after Annette Funicello and was told that there might have been one of her songs an a recent Disney animation soundtrack (I believe it was Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch, the song in question being Pineapple Princess), but that nothing else was now available. Apart from the Best of CD, and the boxed set, neither of which offer, in my opinion, ideal selections of her work, if one wants actually to possess Annette’s music, there are either the downloads (and to be honest, I can’t vouch for availability here, since my eccentricity is such that downloading hardly occurs to me in the normal run of things), or there is the realm of Indiana Jones-like archaeological adventure. Even if one tracks down some second-hand vinyl, of course, not all of us own the necessary equipment for extracting the audio information from such a record any more. But if, for instance, you do manage to trace a copy of, say, Italiannette (which I cannot find on Amazon at the time of writing), and it is delivered safely into your hands, in such condition that it appears a needle will probably not skip in its grooves, and any crackle will be such that it may be considered ambient, and then one excavates an old turntable from the attic, or stumbles upon one in a Cancer Research charity shop, imagine then the first time, having attached the turntable to the mains electricity supply with some hair-brained improvised cable, the first time, I say, that you drop the needle into the grooves that lead into the first song. This is the resurrection and the life.

When, through such experiences and the insights they bring, you find that you are ready to give your life over to Annette Funicello, your friends and family might, at first, be concerned, and you may wonder exactly how to explain what has happened, and how to reassure them that it is a good thing, for yourself, the inner repose of your soul, and for the world at large. Your peers may think that Annette is old-fashioned, unoriginal, light-weight and so on. Sadly, these are the kinds of prejudices you are likely to face. If you find any of your interrogators willing to listen with an open mind, however, play them first one of her more up-tempo hits, such as Tall Paul. In fact, this might be the ideal track, after all, having re-won the advantages of obscurity through being the too-obvious choice. Listen to the stop-go, hopscotch rhythm that opens the track with its cow-bell and woodblock, as odd and attention-grabbing, perhaps, as the opening drums of Bowie’s Five Years. Without warning, as it seems, Annette steps into the song:

Chalk on the sidewalk,

Writing on the wall.

Everybody knows it.

I love Paul.

Few openings could be more effective in conveying the idea of something new arriving. Seemingly dispensing with formalities, the song gives us a picture, at once panoramic and immediate, of playground, classroom, a whole town, in fact, from a teenager’s eye-view – a milieu into which Annette makes her entrance as the soul of mixed brashness and innocence. Who would have thought that Annette would be so bold, caring little for the graffiti about her and her sweetheart, even proud of it? The excitement of the song comes from the revelation of the boldness hidden within the innocent outward presence of the girl next door. And who, hearing this song, would not finally envy Paul, “the captain of / The high school football team”?

Direct the attention of your concerned friends and relatives also to Annette’s voice. Ask them if they have heard anything quite like it. In all probability they will be forced to agree that it occupies a unique timbral space and fills a gap in the pantheon of pop vocal archetypes. Annette was far from confident about her vocal range, but developed a slightly hard-edged, almost nasal, half-talking style, that makes me think of the clacking of high heels, and is as distinct in its way, and as enriching to popular music, as the vocal styles of David Bowie, Joanna Newsom or Morrissey. In fact, you may be able to hear how it anticipates something of the brashness of Debbie Harry or Kim Gordon. Even in purely technical terms, Annette’s vocals represent something of a buried innovation. She was known for the “Annette Sound”. In an interview, Annette tells of how the Annette Sound came into being:

I was working with a wonderful arranger/conductor by the name of Tutti Camarata, who had done all the music for the studio, for the Vista label, and he was so kind to me… and he was just sympathetic and very supportive… In fact, he’s the one that came up with the idea of the “Annette Sound”. To get the Annette Sound I would sing the song through one time, or, you know, sing it many times until it was exactly right, then I’d put the earphones on, hear my own voice, and sing to it, as exact as I could possibly get it. So it gave me that larger sound that I needed, because my voice is very small, and a range of about three notes. So, it just – it worked, I mean, it really worked, because a lot of other artists went to that technique.

I wonder how many recording artists using the technique today realise that Annette Funicello was the first to employ it. I wonder, also, how many people know that John Lennon confessed to taking up the technique for The Beatles specifically after listening to Annette.

Do we need to search for further proof of credibility, to mention such things as Our Annette’s collaboration with The Beach Boys, or her appearance in the Monkees film, Head, when by now we are already past the Gateway of Understanding and on the Road of Faith, where such things as innovation and acclaim are as small as rusted trinkets in the wayside dust, swept aside by our sandals? Why should we stoop to pick them up when we know the greater treasure that lies ahead, the certain reward of our belief?

If Tall Paul and Pineapple Princess are the gateways to such faith, then beyond them there lie the likes of My Blue Muu Muu, a faux-Hawaiian coming-of-age song that hovers in a timeless trance of multiple rhymes and beautiful bathos, bringing to the soul all the wonders due one who has given up the world and gained an obscure B-side, or When You Get What You Want – if you are ready for it – or Stuffed Animal (containing the immortal line, “A stuffed animal never says no”) which are not only beyond the gateway, but beyond words.

Holy are the relics and the ikons that have guided your tired pilgrim feet here, holy and not to be scorned are the CDs, DVDs, YouTube clips, biographies and publicity stills, but perhaps yet another mystery awaits. Those who hold the idol holy and those who believe that the holy spirit in its essence is too holy to be worshipped through an idol, are, in fact, cousins in their faith. Sometimes, perhaps more often than is generally supposed, the soul that worships the idol and the soul that worships the essence is a single soul in a single body. It is enough, for some of us, not necessarily puritans, but understanding the puritan urge, to worship without the signed photograph, without a complete collection of vinyl, without downloads of otherwise transient YouTube clips. It is enough to have memories of the clip in which Our Annette danced as a miniature marionette against a vaudevillian backdrop, her hands in shoes to represent dainty dancing feet, as she mimed to Tall Paul on a black-and-white variety television show, to have dreams of seeing this again one day, and other dreams, also, too sacred to name, and to have faith in the midst of memory and dream. From such are born the works of devotion and worship, the essays and the fan-fiction. From such is born my short tale, ‘Italiannetto’.

Before I leave you, I would like to borrow the words of another Annette Gnostic:

Annette was the personification of all the good things Americans wanted to believe about themselves. She was the malt shops and hayrides and kisses on the cheek. She was beach parties, bonfires, and ‘Anything Can Happen Day.’ And the essence of her star quality, ironically enough, was that she never seemed like a star. No matter how many television shows or movies she made, no matter how many records she sold, no matter how many times her face appeared on the cover of magazines, Annette always remained Annette.

There is always more to say, because words are always insufficient. For now then, let me end by saying only this:

Take a leap of faith – Annette will catch you.