20 Years in 27 Days: A Marriage in Music
Day #8: Laura Branigan—“Gloria”
by Mark Anthony Neal
The Butler Houses, named after, Edmund Borgia Butler, a former chairman of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and former Fordham University Law Professor, are comprised of six twenty-one story apartment buildings located between Webster and Park Avenues to the west and east, and 169th and 171st streets to the south and north. Within those six buildings are 1476 apartments with a conservative (in my mind) estimate of 4,357 residents living in those apartments. “Peaches” was one of them.
In the popular parlance of the day, this was Fort Apache, the Bronx, made famous by the “Bronx is Burning” quip by Howard Cosell during a nationally televised baseball game from Yankee Stadium, and the Paul Newman film, Fort Apache. The natives simply called it the South Bronx—and I knew it well, since I was a product of the place, a few years removed.
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| 170th Street & Webster Avenue |
As such I, perhaps, understood why “Peaches’” mom was hell bent on keeping her 14-year-old daughter off the streets—there would be no mid-afternoon rendezvous on Lexington Avenue and 86th Street—a neighborhood that would become one of our favorites when we visited New York after we were married—and I, for damn sure, wasn’t up for any seek-and-find trips to the Butler Houses. The strange dude on the telephone act wasn’t gonna work either—can’t call a number that you’re not supposed to have, to talk to a girl, who’s not supposed to be getting phone calls.
So I was left that summer, working evenings as a stock boy at a Waldbaums in Co-Op City, spending the days playing Strat-o-Matic—like I said I was a major nerd—watching Ryan’s Hope and All My Children (it’s when my now 29-year addiction to the soap began—still watch it most evenings with the wife)—and listening to 101-WCBS FM and songs like Poco’s “Crazy Love,” The Climax Blues Band’s “I Love You,” Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” and Edison Lighthouse’s “Love Grows.”
The one song that I came to hate that summer was the late Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” for all the obvious reasons; it was a reminder of my lost summer. Didn’t help that it wasn’t a great song, despite being nominated for a Grammy Award in 1983. It would still be some years before I was introduced to another song called “Gloria,” this one recorded by Enchantment, an oft-forgotten vocal group, whose “Where Do We Go From Year,” is one of the great underrated Soul ballads from the 1970s (s/o to Vaughn Harper). It was that other “Gloria” song by Enchantment that was played on our wedding day.
