Spiderman, Spiderman...

…does whatever a spider can… how many of you all remember the little jingle at the beginning of the original Spiderman comics? Well, now there are a couple of Berbers in the Middle Atlas Mountains that do. I sang it for them. J It’s amazing what little scraps of pop-culture seep into life here. Sometimes completely unappreciated, sometimes known and loved… or at least appreciated… like the Dora the Explorer backpack my little neighbor girl wears to school every day. I asked her if she knew the name of the girl on her backpack… she said no, but then I told her. But I couldn’t find a way to explain Dora the Explorer and hold her 5-year-old attention span. More universal is the appeal of hip-hop to teenagers. The love it for the same reason American teenagers do: it’s hot, it’s danceable, and their parents don’t like it. But back to Spiderman.
There was a little gum wrapper lying on the table at the house where I ate kaskarot, the late afternoon meal, today. The little boy picked it up and waved it at me, and from the depths of my memory emerged this little jingle… Spiderman, Spiderman… I couldn’t help myself, I was suddenly singing it to them. They liked it, and asked me, what does it say? So, here I was, explaining Spiderman to them, and reviewing my thievery vocabulary at the same time. This led into a conversation about which spiders in the region are poisonous to humans and which are not. **Note to self, the big ones that crawl around on the floor are the ismn (bad) ones… which means the family that used to reside in my bathroom are better off gone… I used to call them Big Scary, Little Scary, and Mama Scary. For obvious reasons. I digress… So, they asked me to sing it again, and again, and now… despite listening to Radiohead and Led Zepplin, there’s this little jingle floating around in my head…


"Spiderman, Spiderman.
Does whatever a spider can.
Spins a web, through the skies
Catches crooks, just like flies.
Look out, here comes the Spiderman…"