Alan Ilagan

{Note: The Madonna Timeline is an ongoing feature, where I put the iPod on shuffle, and write a little anecdote on whatever was going on in my life when that Madonna song was released and/or came to prominence in my mind.}

This is one of my favorite Madonna song memories because it captures a specific period of time when the world was just opening up to me. The year was 1989, and I had just turned fourteen when Madonna released the third single from Like A Prayer – ‘Cherish’. To be honest, it wasn’t nearly my favorite song from the album, and the video (though brilliant in hindsight, and the first foray of Herb Ritts into the medium) seemed rather ho-hum, especially after the inflammatory riot of ‘Like A Prayer’ and the S&M-tinged sexiness of ‘Express Yourself’.

To see Madonna frolicking on the beach with a child and some mermen? Tame, if not outright dull. But like all good things, it would grow on me, from the girl-group harmonies of the song to the simple, slow-mo beauty of the video. And what was taking place in my young life at the time was simple, but memorable.

So tired of broken hearts and losing at this game

Before I start this dance, I’ll take a chance

In telling you I want more than just romance…

My Mom took me, my Gram, and my brother up to Maine for a last vacation before school started. We went to the beach, but it was already too cold to go in. We stopped at some of the Kittery outlets, and I remember getting a navy cable-knit sweater for Fall. (I was still in my preppy mode but just beginning to break free.) ‘Cherish’ played on the radio, and to this day it’s one of the few Madonna songs that my brother actually liked a bit more than me. At the time, there was something too soft-focus about it – I preferred my pop songs to have a bit more power to them. But like all slow-burners, this one forged its way into my memory.

You are my destiny,

I can’t let go, Baby can’t you see,

Cupid please take your aim at me…

It was the start of my first year of high-school, and I had to attend practices with the Amsterdam Marching Rams. It was ridiculous, insane, and practically dangerous to march with an oboe, but I adamantly refused to learn another instrument, so I strapped a clarinet lyre to the bottom bell and proceeded to practice choking myself with a double reed.

After my eighth grade shenanigans, I wasn’t sure if anyone would even talk to me (that was the year I happily stepped into the villain’s role, so dull and boring was Wilbur H. Lynch Middle School for me). Now, the girls I hurt the most were the only ones I wanted to talk to – and somehow I worked my way, through wit and humor, back into their good graces again.

All the while, ‘Cherish’ bubbled over the radio, and on MTV, but never from my own CD player because I wasn’t obsessed with Madonna right then.

I can’t my need for two hearts that bleed with burning love,

That’s the way it’s got to be.

Romeo and Juliet, they never felt this way I bet,

So don’t underestimate my point of view…

I hadn’t lost my heart to any boys yet – in fact, I was still holding out hope that I’d find a girl and settle down with a wife and a home, and a family. I found men attractive (as I had since I was a little boy) but I put those feelings into the recesses of my heart, willing myself to focus on the girls instead, even though it seemed that I was destined to remain in the friendship circle, with no hope of romance.

Cherish is the word I use to remind me of your love…

To be honest, it didn’t bother me much at the time. Somehow I knew I was only meant to be friends with women – that I was better at being friends with women – and it was a safe and comforting thought. (Oddly enough, the drama and trauma I witnessed in many messy boy-meets-girl scenarios seemed more upsetting and depressing than anything I was going through – one of the strange bonuses of flying under the radar as an unknown-even-to-myself gay kid.) And still the chords and yearning chorus of ‘Cherish’ strummed in my head – a wistful unfulfilled longing for something, for someone.

Cherish – give me faith,

Give me joy, my boy,

I will always cherish you…

As September bled into October, ‘Cherish’ peaked on the airwaves, an Autumnal call to romance that subliminally fueled the innocence of my adolescence. It was a song that held onto summer, despite all the pushes and pulls of a new school, and a new school year, and the slow awakening of a boy who, despite all direction, was headed on a journey all his own.

Song #8: Cherish – October 1989

Apologies for another Madonna song reference, but if you don’t like it, you don’t have to play it. (Video-wise it is definitely one of Madonna’s weaker ones, the kind of throwaway soundtrack work she does between albums of brilliance.) Besides, so many summer memories are attached to songs. Like my online bud Matthew from Boy Culture once wrote in his brilliant compendium The Encyclopedia Madonnica, “Summer has a way of burning music into your consciousness.”

It was July 1992. I had just returned from a trip to Finland for a wedding, leaving the extended European trip early to attend a summer course at Brown University. I thought it would be a good thing to pad my high school resume for college (well, my parents thought it would be – I personally didn’t really care either way). It was a biology course, with some hands-on study at the Roger Williams Park Zoo.

Upon arriving at Brown, I experienced my first and only real bout of homesickness (well, after the age of ten at least) – I didn’t even feel it when I went away to college. This time I was searching for a private place to cry and remembering how I used to look up into the fluorescent lights of my first grade class hoping that they would dry my tears faster. The crying part was over by the second day, and when I found myself with the time and private place to do it again I didn’t even need to. Still, I missed my family, and to assuage the pit in my stomach I spent my free time searching the library at the University for genealogy books. Not that I ever expected to find any Ilagans there, it just felt good to look and make plans in my mind of when I would see them again.

My chosen project at the zoo was a study on the lemurs. I had noticed that one of them sat quietly, while the others ran circles around him, occasionally chasing him out of the way. It was my “hypothesis” that this lemur was more or less being hounded into submission, and was therefore not exhibiting all of his natural behavior. Looking back, it was probably the least scientific hypothesis ever almost-proven, but somehow I pulled it off and garnered an ‘A’ on it (which was the whole grade of the course).

By choosing the lemurs, which were off the beaten path of the zoo and not as exciting or awe-inspiring as the elephants or Tamarin monkeys, I could be alone, watching their antics and taking notes on behavior. I didn’t want to be around the other students, whom I suspected of intelligence greater than mine, but who displayed too many signs of immaturity. The ones I did find interesting – like the girl who wore a billion strands of tiny beads that she had strung herself – had ostracized themselves with their quirky fashion choices or propensity to sleep with each other.

I also had other concerns, in the form of  a psycho red-headed roommate. He had written out a ten-plus page treatise on how he planned to join forces with Satan, take over the world, then double-cross Satan and have the power to himself. Not kidding. When he left for the day, I promptly took a huge risk, stole the papers, ran to the library and made a Xerox copy, then hid it in my luggage in the event that my body was found slaughtered under the bed at the end of the two weeks. Luckily he left me alone, as I must have seemed a non-threat in his quest for universal domination.

The noxious purple loosestrife was just beginning to show its bright color in the zoo’s natural wetlands, and staff warned us of how dangerous it was, in its propensity to take over the wetlands and choke out natives. Summer beat down upon the zoo paths, and I was grateful for the air-conditioned bus ride back to campus at the end of the day.

I didn’t explore Brown University as much as I perhaps should have. Part of me dreaded the idea of college so much that I shrank away from anything remotely connected to it, such as checking out what campus life was like, even if it was the doldrums of summer. I did walk around the small stretch of shops and cafes, and I explored some of the art shops that were there (being in proximity to the Rhode Island School of Design). On one such excursion I picked up an old Herb Ritts compilation – a beautiful pair of of cloth-bound editions of some of his classic shots. In the black-and-white beauty found within its pages, I found a semi-solace from my loneliness, and a glimpse into a world so far and fully removed from my own.

On the radio I listened to Madonna’s This Used To Be My Playground, her last number one Billboard single prior to the Erotica years. It has not weathered the years well, and for quite a while I couldn’t even bring myself to listen to it because it was just so unspectacular. But it was part of my past, and part of that summer. A wistful look back on the season that used to be so carefree and celebratory. It was my last summer of innocence. The next Fall and Winter would bring my first girlfriend and last year of high school.