Song: “Silently”

This album is pretty. Except for the crazy legs on the cover. I’m so glad I didn’t ever see that image until I was a grown-up, because I’m pretty sure it would have traumatized me as a child.

There are two images I still remember from pop culture-y things that freaked me out when I was little.

Three.

Oh, I just remembered one that was so bad I hid it on myself. It’s funny to remember that now. It was one of my mom’s paperback books, and the guy on the cover was wrapped in barbed wire. He was staring at us, like we were supposed to help him, this guy in a polyester suit with his Steve McQueen hair and tough-guy squint. He was bleeding where some of the wire had cut him, and it looked like he was going to live the rest of his life on that wooden floor with the wood paneling behind him, being tortured by someone we can’t see. I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and hid that book.

The other book that scared the crap out of me was my grandmother’s copy of The Exorcist, because it had a picture on the back in the middle of the copy that was supposed to depict the demon inside Reagan. What?! Why would they do that? I remember it was this black, screaming shadow, with a lot of red around it, like he was peeking between her lungs, hanging out on top of her stomach. That sounds crazy. I wonder if that’s what it really was, or if that’s what I thought it was, so that’s how I remember it. But I also remember it being a photograph, and not a drawing. And I don’t think it’s possible to make a photograph of the insides of a teen girl’s body in order to capture the demon spirit that has taken residence in her soul.

And to show you that my fear of images on covers is completely irrational, much like my uncomfortableness about this Blonde Redhead cover (although they were selling it with this red band around the cd, which covered the leg image until you brought it home and opened it up, so clearly I’m not the only one who might be afraid to hold this thing in my hands and stare at it), I used to be so freaked out by my parents’ album of the original Broadway recording of Chicago.

Why? Because it looks like this:

Man, I’m going to have a weird day. Why do I do this to myself?