Ah, the holidays.

It’s a fantastic time to get around the blood relatives and subconsciously dig up old memories from your youth – until they erupt in either vitriol or vocal cacophony of some other sort. Lucky for me, this year it was mostly the latter. (Although it wasn’t long before we became so vexing to mother that she stopped defiling the turkey carcass with the blade she was handling and turned it on us.)

Oh, we have fun.

But the best part is always when my sister and I end up improvising song and drama.

Or – better yet – recalling songs from our childhood word for word – and belting it out in vibrato while our parents look on in simultaneous delight and disgust. As mother and father stared at us with an expression one might wear while watching a stripper shoot a ping pong ball from her lady basement, my sister and I sang them the song of our people. Our first grade people, that is. Which we somehow recalled impeccably one million years later (yet I can’t remember my goddammned Apple password no matter how many times I use it).

Though there are a few different variations of this song, the song that’s revisited us (and that we’ll inevitably be torturing the tympanic membranes of our parents with again come Christmas) is called “Here we go Zudio”. It’s mostly nonsensical. But for what sense we could make of it, we decided that it definitely is about (what else but) hookers. On the track. Trying to bag a John. Or – their pimps.

Let’s start with this camp counselor below, sharing his rendition. (His quick, random lesson on avoiding non-profane language like “frickin’” will be especially fun for you to reflect on after I break down the lyrics for your edification):

Are you dead yet? Well, wake up. Because the fun’s just beginning.

And here’s the breakdown:

“Here we go Sodeo, Sodeo, Sodeo,
Here we go Sodeo,
All Night long.”

1. It’s Zudio. Not “Sodeo”.

3. We’re already at quasi-giggity status with the “all night long” bit…

3. Next line!

“Step back Sally comin’ down the alley
Step back Sally all night long.”

Step back Sally…or you’ll catch my pimp hand?

“Stepback Sally” could also be a euphemism for “Back-door Sally”.

Cuzza her specialty.

“I looked out the window and a what did I see?
I saw a big fat man from Tennessee.
I bet you five dollars I can beat that man
I bet you five dollars I can beat that man.

Hmmm. In our variation it was “get that man”.

Mrs. Nixon would probably say she did this to censor violent language – though it could’ve just been the pimp planning to swindle the fat dood at a poker game – or literally beat him, like with a stick. So was it Backdoor Sally – betting her colleagues that she could talk the tubby Tennesseean into some company for compensation? Or Zudio the pimp who was actually betting his homies he could kick fatty’s ass?

“From the front to the back to the s-s-side
From the front to the back to the s-s-side.”

In the O.G. rendition, it’s “see-saw-side.”

We all know what directions see-saws go in, mmyes?

‘From the front, to the back’. Yes, Backdoor Sally well knows the “no feces till the finale” rule. Basically we’re saying: From the poon to the pooper. And up and down. All night long, Zudio. That – or that Pimp Zudio is enjoying delivering this Alex The Droog style beating in the alley so much that he’s come up with a song fit for Barney and Friends. And Backdoor Sally watches on, probably smoking a cigarette, bored, and desensitized from seeing the same so frequently.

It’s still a tie here. Is this song about Sally’s sexcapades?

Or is it Zudio’s homicide serenade?

“My mother rang the doctor and the doctor said,
Oh ah! I got a pain in my head!
Oh ah! I got a pain in my shoulder
Oh ah! I got a pain in my hip bone
Oh ah! I got a pain in my knee
Oh ah! I got a pain in my foot.”

Ah! There we go, Zudio! The whole song comes together now like the end of an M. NightShareMyLongDong movie. Zudio’s beaten up his own mother’s corpulent Southern doctor in the alley. And today his mother needs that doctor (the Clockwork Orange theme is strong with this song – i.e. when Alex needs the doc he put in a wheelchair). But he’s in a full body cast. So she can’t get her diabetes medicine refilled and will probably die on her way to the quack across town because she’s gone into insulin shock at the wheel.

Nice going, Zudio.

You’ve killed your mother.

Now who will you sing your first grade songs to this Christmas?