Talking to your girlfriend’s mother on the phone can be a challenge. Particularly if she won’t let you speak to her daughter.
Even worse is if your girlfriend is breaking up with you and you desperately want to talk to her, to apologize, to express your love, to plead with her, to convince her that you are, in fact, a guy worth keeping. But her mother won’t let her know you’re on the phone.
This painful situation is captured in a 1972 song called Sylvia’s Mother, by a group called Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show.
The song is in the form of verse/chorus. In each of the three verses, the caller tells us what the mother said. And in each chorus, we hear the guy pleading with the mother, even calling her by name.
Here’s an example of a verse:
“Sylvia’s mother says Sylvia’s busy, too busy to come to the phone. Sylvia’s mother says Sylvia’s trying to start a new life of her own. Sylvia’s mother says Sylvia’s happy, so why don’t you leave her alone?”
And here is the chorus that follows each verse:
“Please, Mrs. Avery, I just gotta talk to her. I’ll only keep her a while. Please, Mrs. Avery, I just want to tell her goodbye.”
Of course, he is only saying that last part (I just want to tell her goodbye) to convince Mrs. Avery to put Sylvia on the phone. He doesn’t want to tell her goodbye; he wants to say please don’t leave.
There is an added bit of frustration at the end of each verse. It comes in the form of a one-line pre-chorus that says:
“And the operator says forty cents more for the next three minutes.”
This sentence will be lost on today’s generation, too young to remember pay phones. When the amount of time you paid for was up, the operator, rather than disconnecting the call, would ask for more coins to be fed into the slot.
Another puzzling aspect is why does the woman have her daughter’s cell phone? She doesn’t, because there were no cell phones. Most households had a single, corded phone. And in this case, the mother answered it and is refusing to tell the daughter she has a phone call.
I told you all that so I could tell you this.
I recently found out that Sylvia’s Mother was written by none other than Shel Silverstein, author of beloved children’s books such as Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Giving Tree.
And I learned there was a young woman named Sylvia that Shel was in love with. Her last name wasn’t Avery, it was Pandolfi. She was leaving for Mexico to get married. And Shel, hoping to convince her to stay, really did call her from a pay phone, only to be thwarted by Mrs. Pandolfi.
Sylvia’s Mother is a beautiful, poignant song. If it’s been awhile since you heard it, give it a fresh listen. If you’ve never heard it, find it. Have a hankie nearby.
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