And now for something completely different...

Tonight M. is out with friends so I'm at home alone with the girls, who are currently sound asleep.

I decided it was a prime opportunity to spend the evening YouTubing some of my favorite music to A) expose the girls to music I like and B) enjoy the music myself. I don't often get to listen to "my" music because M. likes to have control of the music when we listen to it. I don't mind. We mostly like the same music.

**Warning: I will be showing my age by using the word "album" instead of CD or MP3. Because I actually owned the vinyl versions of the albums referenced below.**

In one respect we differ greatly.

I love easy listening music. LOVE.IT. The cheesier, the better. M. thinks its crap and just gives me the "WTF?" look when I line up my Dan Fogelberg or Barbra Streisand albums in the WinAmp queue.

While YouTubing some Celine Dion and Bee Gees, I rediscovered my favorite Barbra Streisand album, "Guilty".

It could easily be her best album, with the combination of the Barry Gibb/Barbra Streisand duets of "Guilty" and "What Kind of Fool" and the weird and bluesy-jazzy-rocky selections of "Make It Like A Memory" and "Promises".

Guilty was one of the very first Barbra albums I ever bought. Right after "Funny Girl" and "Hello Dolly". I was all of 15 or 16 years old. Years I should have spent listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam and various other angsty-my-life-sucks-and-I-live-in-Seattle-so-I'm-cool-now music. But no. I surrounded myself with Barbra. I learned every word of every song on every album she ever made up until that point. I spent hours in my bedroom, sprawled across my bed, wearing a Walkman and listening to this music over and over and over again. Something about her voice and her music made me happy. Even though I had nothing to be unhappy about, I was still a teenager and I thought the world was going to end pretty much every day for (looking back on it) completely ridiculous reasons.

So tonight I'm introducing the girls to Barbra.