https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPBkiBbO4_4

I made a severe mistake, a few hours ago, in bringing up Girl Groups in an otherwise splendid Facebook post on chili beans and cornbread.

I then compounded that mistake by frittering away some perfectly good weeding and/or cleaning time looking at old videos of The Ronettes, The Crystals, The Shirelles and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Sigh!

The undisputed queens of the genre, of course, were the Supremes. If the Supremes (or the Beatles or Petula Clark) were on The Ed Sullivan Show Sunday nights in 1964 or 1965, all activity in our home, with the exception of minimal breathing activity, ceased.

My Mom adored Diana Ross (and Ringo, by the way). I concurred on Diana, of course. But the most frankly sexy of the three, in my fervid thirteen-year-old imagination, was Flo, the Supreme on the left. She had the most captivating smile and when she looked directly into the camera I turned into a pile of goo. Flo was fictionalized as the tragic member of the group in Dreamgirls; she left the Supremes in 1967 because real life is tragic, too.

It happened, I guess, in part because Diana Ross’s eyelashes were so long and her ego was so big.

But none of that mattered when they were on Sullivan. That shimmy at the start of this performance, for example, was devastating, and Diana was enchanting.

Only The Supremes could transmute a song about infidelity into something so…well, I guess ‘joyful’ is the word. And, yes, it mattered that they were black and from Detroit. They were so beautiful and, thanks to the magic of our Zenith color television, they were singing to us and they were in our living room with us. The barrier between us, between their lives and ours, was seemingly dissolved.

We welcomed, then, the illusion that we knew the Supremes; of course, I went a bit beyond that and fell in love with them.

You couldn’t take your eyes off Diana Ross.

And when a song like this came on the radio, you couldn’t stop the acceleration of your pulse the instant you recognized the opening notes. You missed it the instant it was done.