Toms – "I Did the Wrong Thing" (1979)

I did the wrong thing to the right girl

I’d do anything to turn back time

(That makes two of us, bud.)

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I have a mild case of omphalophobia – I freak out when someone tries to touch my belly button.  

EWWWWW!

Those who suffer from more severe omphalophobia feel anxious even when they see someone else touching his or her own belly button.  Some can’t even look at a belly button.

I’m not that crazy.  I just want you to keep your cotton-pickin’ finger out of my belly button.  (Anything else is fair game.)

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According to Dr. Julie Segre, the first scientist to create a topographical map of the various and sundry bacteria and fungi that live on the human body, most of our skin is comparable to an arid desert – not much lives there.

“But as you walk through this desert you encounter an oasis, which is the inside of your nose,” she said. “You encounter a stream, which is a moist crease. [These] areas are like habitats rich in diversity.”

(I’m visualizing that “moist crease” right now, and feeling just a bit queasy.)

The human underarm is akin to a lush rain forest – plenty of diverse microbes can be found there.  

And so is the humble belly button.

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A few years ago, a group of researchers at North Carolina State University with nothing better to do swabbed the belly buttons of 60 adults, and found a total of 2368 different species of bacteria hiding in their subjects’ umbilical nooks and crannies.

Here are just a few:

An astonishing 1458 of those microbial species – over 60% – were new to science, according to the Belly Button Biodiversity project’s write-up of its findings..

One person’s belly button harbored bacteria that had previously been found only in soil from Japan – a place the man had never visited.  Another subject had a type that typically lives in the polar ice caps.

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The Belly Button Biodiversity’s scientists aren’t worried by any of that.  They say that the vast majority of those bacteria live in harmony with their human hosts.  So they believe most people don’t need to worry about keeping their belly button clean.

But Dr. Claire Cronin begs to differ.  She points out that surgeons who do laparoscopic procedures often use the belly button as the port of entry, and worries about people with untidy umbilicuses: 

There is a surprising lack of awareness on the public's part as to what can accumulate in a belly button. . . . I like to think of it as a cache of a lifetime of little treasures. . . . Most patients have not received adequate instruction on proper umbilical hygiene. It has not received the same level of attention that the area behind the ears has. . . . There is a technique to cleaning the belly button.  It involves soap and water and gentle probing. . . . Alcohol should not be used, in order to not disturb the delicate pH balance of the area. 

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New Jersey native Tommy Marolda was one of the zillions of American kids who were glued to their TV sets in February 1964 when the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show.  He taught himself to play the guitar, and pretty soon was playing at local clubs with a cover band.

Tommy Marolda today

But Marolda eventually developed stage fright, and decided to focus on writing songs and producing records in the recording studio he built in the basement of his home.

In 1979, he recorded and a one-man album as the Toms – which made sense, since it featured Tom on vocals, Tom on guitar, Tom on bass, and Tom on drums.  “I Did the Wrong Thing” is from that album, which features several other very good power-pop tracks:

Marolda eventually moved to California to work for Paramount Pictures, writing original music for movies (like Stayin’Alive and Days of Thunder), television shows (Bones, America’s Next Top Model), and TV commercials.  He now lives in Nevada, and recently released Toms album number seven.

Click here to visit Tommy’s website. 

Click here to listen to today’s featured song – which is another winner I first heard on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show in 1980.

And click below to buy the song from Amazon: