LONDON CALLING: Talkin' Funny

I understand Madonna a little better now.

Not totally, you understand. The Sex book, the conical bras, the fine line between adoption and discount shopping, those things all still elude me. She's kind of a weird one, that Madonna.

But her tendency to slip into an English accent, in spite of her upbringing in the greater Detroit metropolitan area, that I kinda get.

It's widely accepted here in the States that you can say almost anything in an English accent, and it will sound better. Give Patrick Stewart a copy of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and I promise you he will make it sound like an Edwardian classic.

I'm not sure if they have the same feeling in Great Britain, where they all by and large talk like that. I mean, they can buy their own copies of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and the fact that they're reading it themselves in their own accents probably doesn't make the book any better. What I do know is that nobody in England is imagining how much cooler something would sound if it was read with an American accent.

(Well, except maybe rock 'n' roll songs. A lot of British bands try to sound American when they sing. But I'm getting off point here.)

The thing is, there's a real charge from being in a place where there's not just an occasional accent around me, but exclusively accents. Which means, of course, that I'm the one with the accent. Again, I'm getting sidetracked. It's just such a thrill. It sounds incredibly stupid, but I had this ongoing sensation, this repeating thought: "I'm surrounded by British people!" Like I said, it sounds ridiculous. But for someone who has spent over three decades in the same country, it was very exciting.

And then the desire to fit in takes over.

Once, many years ago, my grandfather and I were at Walt Disney World, and we decided to speak with British accents for a while. We didn't declare this out loud. There was just this tacit understanding that we were playing a little prank on the world. And we did a pretty good job, if I do say so myself.

Now, at cash registers and on trains and running down streets, I was confronted with the real thing. And I wanted to fit in. Again, not a conscious decision. But every now and then, I adopted an accent of my own.

This sounds incredibly childish. I accept that. But believe me, it's a little beyond self-control. When you head this accent that you've grown up to believe is the essence of cool, how can you help but play along? Sometimes it would happen before I'd realized it. It probably drove Clair nuts. But I won't apologize. It just felt like the right thing to do.

So Madonna and the accent? I get it. It's not right. But it makes sense.