There are lots of famous summers. You may know about “the Summer of Love” from stories your parents told you-unless, of course, your parents were actually part of it, in which the stories might be chemically repressed. You may have heard of the “summer of our discontent.” It’s the season that followed the more famous “winter of our discontent” when Shakespeare’s Richard III realized he couldn’t give away his kingdom for a horse. Then, of course, there’s the “Summer of the 17th Doll” by Austrian playwright Ray Lawler, which nobody knows about and which I had to look up just to make my examples of famous summers a group of three.
Why? Because it’s time to make our own famous “summer.” After all, the love summer was 40 years ago, the discontented summer was 400 years ago, and who knows how old the doll one is. Therefore, I hereby declare that the ensuing hot months of the year 2007 will be known as “the Summer of Threes.”
Everything this summer is happening in threes. Take the cinema, for instance: There are now three Spiderman movies, three Shrek movies, and three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, not to mention three modern tellings of Danny Ocean’s casino capers. In sports, the San Antonio Spurs are defending their three NBA Championship titles, Rafael Nadal of Spain won his third French Open tennis championship, and the Belmont Stakes was won by “Rags-to-Riches,” a three-year old filly. Even in the area of crime and punishment, Paris Hilton has now been in and out of prison three times, and Congressman William Jefferson has pled innocent to three different federal charges.
Perhaps the most convincing argument for “the Summer of Threes” is an event that inaugurated the season on its very first Monday. About a week ago, the world record for number of guitarists simultaneously playing the introductory riff of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” was broken.
Of course, “Smoke on the Water” is itself a three-thing. The opening to the song is typically the third thing all guitarists learn, right after where to put the left hand and where to put the right hand. Further, that famous guitar opening is essentially three variations of three musical notes: (1) domp, domp, domm, (2) domp, domp, da-domm, (3) domp, domp, domm, da-domm.
On June 4, 2007, the new, Guinness-documented record was reset in Kansas City, Kansas, with 1680 participants strumming their steel strings in a unison that was never a risk for harmonically quivering the nearby Mississippi River Bridge and send it tumbling to the ground. What was tumbled to the ground, however, was the previous record of 1323 set in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1995. All these numbers-2007, 1680, 1323, and 1995-are all perfectly divisible by three. Further, there are three famous Kansas Cities-the one in Kansas where all the guitarists set the new world record, the much larger one in Missouri which forbade the guitarist convergence and forced them to meet across the river, and the one in Illinois, which, when its two guitarists return home, will have a population of 114-a multiple of three.
So, rather than deny or resist the great, celestial triangulation of fate this summer, perhaps you should embrace it. The next time you drive off campus for lunch, burning $3-per-gallon gasoline and leaving behind for three-times-twenty minutes or so the three, six, or nine hours of summer course credit you’re taking this summer, why not order three patties on that Wendy’s burger? After all, there will be some good, omega-3 fats in the mayonnaise.
