Mishearing Lyrics, Meeting Daryl Hall, and Not being on Anyone’s List

I was 14 the summer Hall & Oates’s “Kiss on My List” was released. It was 1980 and I spent every waking minute at Crickerbrook Farm, a horse stable in Monroe CT. My Dad was the High School English teacher at Joel Barlow High School in Redding, CT and his student, Cindy McCann, taught horseback riding at Crickerbrook. She was an accomplished event rider who owned a beautiful black and white gelding named Woodstock, named for the white patch near his girth that resembled Woodstock, the chirpy yellow bird from the Peanuts comic strip.
My parents couldn’t afford a horse, no less buy me riding lessons, but Dad who drove me to the barn­­––45 minutes each way––every weekend. There, I’d work the entire weekend just for a chance to ride in a lesson with Cindy for an hour.

Before Crickerbrook, I’d spent years learning to ride on a pony named Frosty. He was a grey and white Pinto with a fat dimpled rump and a knack for dumping me then standing over me as if he were laughing. He was my first boyfriend.
I had my own specific tastes in music and it was ALL David Bowie all the time. As Frosty and I clomped over roads, through the Redding CT subdivisions, and raced across any open field, I kept company with a Walkman clipped to the waistband of my jeans. I played my Bowie cassettes over and over feeling like a hero, just for one day.
I didn’t particularly like Hall & Oates’s sound but I couldn’t avoid “Kiss on My List.” It was everywhere that summer. I’d been working at Crickerbrook as a groom for a year by then; mucking stalls, cleaning saddles, turning out horses, and riding any horse that needed exercise. I was what Cindy called an “industrial rider,” meaning I could stay on any horse she put me on, but didn’t look pretty doing it.
I’d become friends with Cheryl, the barn owner’s daughter. Cheryl was gamine with dirty blonde hair and a fancy horse. She was lithe in her britches and jacket. She also had a potty mouth, which endeared her to me. We became inseparable. She was a fan of Top-40 music. I loved Bowie, The Fine Young Cannibals, and Blondie. Cheryl was boy crazy. I was horse crazy.

*

Cheryl’s horse was a golden chestnut. His face had a flashy white blaze from forehead to muzzle, and he had similar flash above his hooves. He was huge at nearly 17 hh (at 14, I had to stand on a small stool to brush his back or braid his mane) and he was feisty.  As I groomed him that day in the barn aisle he threw his head up and down, stomped his hooves and side-eyed me. It hadn’t happened yet, but Cheryl would later break her back on this horse. He’d rear up and smash her against the steel beams of the indoor ring.
“Kiss On My List” came on the barn radio so I began singing along. Cheryl was in the stall picking out balls of manure and fluffing shavings. We were both “farting around” according to Cindy.
“Are you singing Kiss on my LIPS?” Cheryl said.
“Yeah, those are the lyrics,” I said.
“Uh, no they’re not,” she said. “It’s “Kiss On My List”.”
I was silent. I couldn’t comprehend the concept of a kiss being on someone’s list.
Mishearing lyrics would become a signature trait of mine and my friends enjoyed making fun of my lyrical misfires. I’d sing “Dirty jeans, d-d-d-dungarees” to AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” or “You made the rice, I made the gravy” to Billy Joel’s “You May be Right,” and “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy,” to Jimi Hendrix.
“Brian said my kiss is on his list,” Cheryl said. Brian was her boyfriend. “Whose kiss in on your list?”
I looked at her. I didn’t have a list like that.

*

Psychoanalysts like Jung and Freud eroticized the connection between girls and horses, as if the sole point of riding was to achieve orgasm, or the bond between horse and rider was a way of gaining sexual power through penis envy.
“A little girl’s horse craze betrays either her primitive autoerotic desires,” wrote Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, in 1926, “… or her penis envy (if she identifies with the big, powerful animal and treats it as an addition to her body); or her phallic sublimations (if it is her ambition to master the horse, to perform on it, etc.)” 
There was peer pressure everywhere to have been kissed or to have had sex, which I wouldn’t be having for another five years. I loved horses because they didn’t judge, or ghost, or pressure: a horse responds to words, actions, kindness and patience. To earn a horse’s trust is to forge an unbreakable bond.
My ability to ride difficult horses became my signature. I could soothe an anxious mount. I could stay on when a horse reared or bucked. I was told I had “soft hands” and that I “had a way with animals.” I learned that riding, like any relationship, requires a delicate balance; an unspoken give and take.
Understanding how to soothe and calm a feisty horse made me feel powerful in a way I didn’t feel at school, where I felt awkward in general and especially around boys. I was easily bored in school and an uncomplicated horse bored me too. I rode the misfits perhaps because I felt like a misfit myself. Being in the saddle was a way of figuring myself out.

*

On nights before horse shows, I’d lie awake and count the championship and blue ribbons that wallpapered Cheryl’s bedroom, track how many times “Kiss On My List” played, and listen to the numbers flip on her clock radio. One night I counted the song eight times before I fell asleep.

I’d go to horse shows as Cheryl’s groom and was paid in riding lessons or allowed to trailer one of their lesson horses to ride in a class or two. I had to come up with the entry fees, which were $65 per class. These were A-rated shows. Horses were pedigreed and cost tens of thousands of dollars, the girls wore impeccably tailored show coats, polished high leather black boots, beige breeches with suede knee patches, and rode in Steuben saddles. My horse was one of the lesson mounts (unless Cindy let me ride Woodstock). I rode in a navy blazer I found at the Goodwill and a white turtleneck that stood in for a show shirt. My breeches were khakis I tucked into black rubber boots. I also always seemed to have dirt on my face. A clotheshorse, I was not.
I wanted to be more like Cheryl, with her wall of championship ribbons, fancy high horse, and a boyfriend who chose her kiss for his list. I could capably and safely guide any horse under my own power yet I hadn’t realized my own power.

*

“Kiss On My List” was one of the original videos that aired the day MTV launched in 1980. I remember friends yelling “I WANT MY MTV.” We had no access to cable TV, just the same four channels on a console.

I rarely saw MTV videos because it meant I had to be invited over to someone’s actual house to watch their actual TV. I worked at the barn on weekends, and had orchestra practice most nights, so I had little free time, but I also wasn’t getting invited anywhere.
What I remember most about Hall & Oates was their hair; luxurious as the horses’ manes I brushed and braided. In that first video Hall towered over his keyboard flinging his golden mullet. He was the flashy show horse, while Oates jokingly called himself the “highest paid backup singer in the history of rock and roll” even though he co-wrote nearly all the songs on their albums.

The duo seemed to have a genuine collaborative relationship void of ego, infighting and the clashes that typically break bands apart. They’d come from gritty Philadelphia, met at Temple University, and operated outside much of the drama and politics of the music world. When they were finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 (despite being eligible since 1997) they opened their speech saying: “Nobody does this together, but we’ve been doing it together for 40 years.”

*

That summer of 1980 seemed filled with songs of happiness, and heartbreak. Songs of unrequited longing like “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield; the ubiquitous “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang; Blondie’s “The Tide is High (but I’m Holdin’ On),” which I sang as movin’ on; “Endless Love” by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, “Physical” by Olivia Newton John which was my favorite to roller skate to and the longest running No. 1 song that year.
All the popular kids were wearing glittery headbands on their foreheads, Candies sandals, and pulling their permed hair into side ponytails with Scrunchies. I was a chubby, horse loving, violin playing, brunette with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and what my Mom referred to as “weak ankles.” I didn’t want to get physical in the way Olivia Newton John meant, I didn’t want to hear my body talk, and my kiss was on nobody’s list.
Things (not a kiss) that were on my list in 1980:

• A horse of my own

• A horse of my own

• A horse of my own

• A horse of my own

• Candies sandals

• Gloria Vanderbilt jeans

• Leather riding boots

• A horse of my own

• A horse of my own

• A horse of my own

“Kiss” made plenty of important lists in the coming summers. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1981 and hit Billboard’s Hot 100. Co-written by Hall and Janna Allen­­­­­­ (his girlfriend Sara’s sister) it was the first song she ever wrote. Hall & Oates recorded it as a demo and released it directly from that demo tape.
Hall called “Kiss On My List” an “anti-love” song.  He said it was a sarcastic take on a woman’s kiss being on a list that comprised many other things that may or may not be just as important.
I didn’t know it yet, but I’d meet Daryl Hall in person a year later.

*

Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” came out the next summer (1981) and even though I’d never heard of the band, a sophomore crush told me they were his favorite. He had deep dark eyes and a mullet of lush, black hair like John Oates. I didn’t love Journey’s sound, but I tried to like the song because my crush liked it and I wanted him to like me.
All my High School crushes were unrequited and I began to wonder if unrequited love was what Hall meant when he said “Kiss On My List” was not a love song.
Horses were my boyfriends and by the time I was a sophomore in high school, my parents had agreed to let me keep a small horse given to me by a family friend whose daughter was going off to college. Gahen, a 14.2 hh brown Connemara pony, arrived at my house with a borrowed Steuben saddle. I was giddy with excitement and she was gimpy with a bowed tendon.
Cindy introduced me to the world of eventing, which was a combination of dressage, stadium jumping, and cross-country. The sport combined risk, speed, and skill. Riders and horses galloped across open fields and jumped over high, wide, immovable jumps. We’d heard rumors of deaths when a horse would hit a jump made of timbers, stone, or a solid gate chest first and somersault beyond the jump. These were called rotational falls and sometimes riders were crushed when their horse landed on them. Eventing seemed the bad boy of the equestrian world and I was attracted to complication, toughness, and vulnerability, all things I’d later seek out in the men I dated.
“No one cares what you look like going over cross country jumps,” Cindy said, “the point is to get over in one piece.”
Apart from giving me riding lessons, Cindy taught me life lessons. She’d line us up horizontally at the edge of an open field and say, “We’re going to gallop across this field so I want you to do two things: watch for holes because your horse can break a leg. Oh, and don’t fall off.”
Being on the back of a horse felt like freedom to me and eventing emphasized my strengths. I realized how much I’d been constrained to certain rules by riding in hunter/equitation classes which were judged on my perceived weaknesses––poise, dress, and thinness––instead of my powers such as courage, skill, and determination.
I didn’t own a flashy horse, but had a borrowed, serviceable mare with an injured front leg. I set about rehabilitating Gahen with long walks through fields. As she grew stronger walking became trotting, cantering, and then jumping anything in our way. Gahen and I bonded this way all summer. Lacking a ring to ride in, we trained for our first dressage test in an open field and practiced cross-country by jumping over logs and crumbling stone fences in the woods. Together, we listened to each other. My legs and hands guided her through the motions of a test we were preparing for together.

Later that summer, I entered us in a small one-day event organized by the Litchfield Pony Club 10 miles from my house. I didn’t own a trailer so I saddled Gahen at 4 a.m. and rode her slowly up to the event with my Walkman in my ears. I changed in the Port-a-Potty between phases, but we competed successfully and rode home in darkness. I rubbed her legs with liniment, and went to bed sweaty, dirty, and happy.

*

In addition to working on the farm, I’d begun other after-school and weekend jobs to save even more money for my horse obsession. I rode the school bus to the edge of town and then walked two miles down the train tracks to Ancona’s Food Market in Ridgefield, CT where I’d found work as a cashier.
This area of Connecticut was still considered sleepy and rural, yet it was a haven for artists and musicians who had escaped New York. My Dad had renovated Mary Traver’s (Peter, Paul, and Mary) home, and Meatloaf was the softball coach at my high school: students called him alternately “Coach Loaf” and “Coach Meat.”
Ancona’s was a boutique supermarket that stocked exotic foods like headcheese and capers. We, the cashiers and the stock boys, would regularly steal food or use frozen turkeys for after-hours aisle bowling. We had our share of celebrity customers and had been counseled not to be star struck.
One evening, the pneumatic doors slid open and a hush descended over the cashiers. It was a slow night. I was at the far end using Windex to clean the conveyor belt at my register.
“It’s Daryl Hall,” my friend Sandy whispered.
I saw him striding toward my register. Hall was much taller than I’d imagined, and rail thin. His eyes were bright blue. Sara Allen stood behind him; a stunning brunette with tousled hair and twinkling dark eyes. She’d inspired the song “Sara Smile” that was the first song ever by Hall & Oates to hit on Billboard’s Top 10 in the late 70s. She’d been a writer/arranger on more than 300 songs. They each cradled groceries in their arms. Hall laid his gently on my register before Sara stepped up and did the same.
I met his eyes and he nodded at me. Hall was wearing a black leather biker jacket and acid-washed jeans with a pattern that looked to me like butterflies flying across his thighs. I remember Sara had on a black crew neck sweater and black biker boots. They seemed like a regular couple stopping for some groceries on the way home. I’d wanted to say something intelligent, but instead this came out:
“Are those butterflies on your jeans?” I said.
Hall looked down, smiled slightly, and told me a friend had dyed them that way.
“Cool,” I said, looking down for the price tag so I could punch the numbers into my register.
My friend Sandy jumped to the end of my conveyor belt to bag Hall’s groceries.
After he left I realized Hall had walked to the end of the store, past at least three other open registers to come to mine. It made me feel chosen and seen.
My first kiss happened later that same year. I was a 15-year-old violinist in the pit orchestra of the senior play. I’d been invited to the cast party and after many beers, the leading man and I snuck out to his VW bug where he bent me across his lap and introduced me to the French kiss. It was deep, warm, and sensual.
I spent the weekend singing “Kiss On My List” because I thought for sure my kiss was finally on someone’s list, but on Monday he avoided me in the hallway and we never spoke again. Many years later I’d learn he was driving a school bus.

*

In the decades since that summer I’ve been married, raised two sons and a stepdaughter, got amicably divorced, and have reclaimed my life as a single woman.
I’ve also owned many complicated horses, including a 16 hh appendix gelding who was blind in one eye, and a smart little mare I broke and trained from the ground up. I fell off—or was bucked off—more times than I could count, yet dusted myself off and got back on, just as Cindy would have advised.
I’ve stopped looking for the mystery turn in “Kiss On My List” because I realize it’s not in the lyrics, but in the lens through which I listen to it. I hear Janna Allen’s voice now instead of Daryl Hall’s.

”Kiss On My List” was on Hall & Oates’ Voices album. Allen co-wrote Kiss and the 4-track studio demo appeared in its original form on Voices. She also co-wrote “Private Eyes.” Both songs shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s chart.
Allen wrote two other Top 10 songs, as well as songs for Cheap Trick and Joan Jett. Allen’s own voice was silenced too soon when she died of leukemia at 36 in 1993.
Voices was “the beginning of the real Hall & Oates,” Hall said. “Everything before this was just practice. This was where we figured out how to put rock and soul together.” The album launched Hall & Oates from playing in clubs to playing stadiums and arenas. It was their coming-of-age, and it marked mine as well.
My divorce was less an end than a beginning. At 50 I finally began listening to my own voice. I know now that I have the power to make my own list and, best of all, I decide whose kiss gets to be on it.

Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer and visual artist. Her work was listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2017 and has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Find her work in Redivider, Longreads, Hotel Amerika, Catapult, and Monkeybicycle, among others. She is Associate Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. On Twitter she’s @megangalbraith, on Instagram @the_d0llh0use, and on Facebook @The.D0llhouse.