Democrats have been waiting two years for the chance to slow America’s descent into fascism, and tomorrow we’ll finally find out if the voters have met the challenge. Will the results match the high expectations polls have engendered? The anticipation is excruciating.
Carly Simon’s ode to anticipation didn’t involve a lot of waiting. She wrote it in 15 minutes when her date was late picking her up – some guy named Cat Stevens. Yeah, that Cat Stevens – Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger weren’t the only famous guys she dated before she married James Taylor. It became the lead track and title song of her second album, and reached No. 13 on the Billboard chart in 1971.
Boomers and older GenXers remember the song not as a radio hit but as the musical accompaniment to Heinz ketchup commercials. You see, kidz, ketchup didn’t used to come in a plastic squeeze bottle that made it easy to apply. Heinz was sold in glass bottles, and it’s technically what’s called a non-Newtonian sheer-thinning liquid – that means it acts like a solid unless force is applied.
As we old heads remember, pounding on the bottom of the bottle made it flow. If you didn’t, you could wait quite a while before it reached your french fries, and in 1973 some clever Don Draper type got the bright idea to use Simon’s song to highlight that. It worked so well that Heinz used it for 10 years.
