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Just Call Me Betty

Tell me if this is weird or not… A week on, Crystal Swing’s raunchy He Drinks Tequila is still playing on a constant rotation in my head. Stranger still, when I hum the song to myself, and it comes to the ‘And just call me baby’ line… for some reason I keep singing ‘And just call me Betty.’ Even though I know those aren’t the words. Read into that what you will, Mr Freud! My obsession with the song was actually discussed on Newstalk’s Weekend Blend yesterday. We were doing a sort of run through of the week’s stories. In the segment before, we’d been discussing the fact that about a third of Irish marriages now end in divorce. Someone mentioned a statistic that, in India, only 1% of arranged marriages end in divorce. It was posited that we might all, therefore, be better off if our parents chose our marital partners for us.

(I strongly disagreed, arguing that anyone who was servile enough to agree to an arranged marriage, would obviously also be more likely to persist with an unsuitable marriage even if it made them unhappy. But that’s neither here nor there.)

The show was about to go to commercial break. When it came back, we were going to talk about Crystal Swing. By means of seguing between the two topics, host Orla Barry mentioned that Mary from Crystal Swing had given an interview to the Irish Times that day. “If Mary could chose a husband for her daughter Dervla,” she asked, “Who do you think she’d pick?” Cue just about the most embarrassed silence in Irish broadcasting history.