“I get to be Rita Onnie-Connie!”

my sister and I used to watch The Lawrence Welk Show.

we were kind of obsessed, actually; it would come on PBS on Saturday nights at 8, and we watched religiously. we were fascinated by the way Lawrence Welk popped his cheek to sound like a champagne bottle in the opening song, amused by the oboe player who would shut his eyes and raise his eyebrows during his solo. we loved the tap dance routines; we thought Jo Ann Castle was awesome — kind of strange, but awesome. on occasion we pretended to be The Lennon Sisters, or we would sing duets and pretend that we were on the show.

keep in mind that we had expansive imaginations. we could pretend almost anything, and we did… including but not limited to being lost at sea (a blanket canopy over our bunk beds was the ship, our carpet was the sea, linkin logs– as sausage –were our food, our stuffed animals were our companions).

but usually when we played that we were on the show, we wanted to be soloists — and there were basically two girls to choose from. one was Norma Zimmer, an older but still pleasant soprano, also known as The Champagne Lady. (I’m not really sure why that was her title, it just was.) but the one we really wanted to be? Rita Onnie-Connie. she was slender, sultry, hispanic. she had long and, at a later date, Farrah Fawcett-ish hair, which I was too young to recognize as passe. and, of course, she wore pretty clothes.

when Hannah and I would play, as soon as the idea of Lawrence Welk was agreed upon we would try to beat each other to blurting out “I get to be Rita Onnie-Connie!” she was, you know, everything we wanted to be… Rita.

or so I thought. as I was reminiscing about this this morning, remembering how I used to sing into my hairbrush and imagine myself with feathered hair, I began to wonder if Rita Onnie-Connie was on YouTube. how funny would it be to take a little stroll down memory lane? then came the realization that I didn’t really know how to spell her name — sure, we had always pronounced it ‘Onnie-Connie,’ but it’s not like that could possibly be the way it was spelled. so I did what I do when I know google won’t work: wiki. on the Lawrence Welk Show wikipedia page I quickly scanned the list of performers for ‘Rita.’ there wasn’t one. I began to actually read the list and before long I found “Anacani, singer (1973-1982).”

so I did some searching. her name? Anacani Maria Consuelo y Castillo Lopez Cantor Montoya. I thought, “well, maybe her name was so long they left off the sur-names and started calling her Maria Anacani.” Maria, Rita, easily confused in the mind of a 5-year-old, right? thanks to YouTube, I know that I’m wrong. for the most part, they just called her Anacani. I was beginning to wonder how on earth I ever got ‘Rita’ fixed in my mind as her first name, and then I discovered the reason: Lawrence Welk himself.

[just the first twenty seconds are sufficient to understand why, if you don't want to subject yourself to further viewing; or you could keep going and see the heights to which I aspired.]

seniorita Anacani. I guess I was 5, too busy dancing to pay attention, and so unfamiliar with Spanish that I didn’t realize what he was saying.

and after that long and deeply revealing entry, I’m off to bed… with the credits song for the Lawrence Welk Show rolling in my head.