Do they make Shirley Temples in Heaven?

Me and the Good Ship Lollipop

For all the stories you hear about child stars and how awful their off-screen lives are, Shirley Temple’s passing is a reminder of something different. Something that was the opposite of seedy. The opposite of TMZ.

Shirley Temple was more famous than Justin Bieber in her day; her pinchable cheeks, ridiculous curlicues and up-the-wazoo pluck will still make you smile when you watch her.

Then something incredible happened: Shirley Temple became a person. Just as she was a screen pioneer, she became a political pioneer, taking high-level political posts and living quietly, out of the spotlight, for decades.

So what do I have to do with Shirley Temple?

Well, first of all, my grandfather owned a restaurant in Virden, Manitoba, population 2,000. Every time my brother and I would visit him, he would fashion us a Shirley Temple: orange juice, grenadine, 7-Up, two cherries skewered by a plastic sword. We would then load up on the cloyingly sweet pinkish syrup, down the maraschinos, and use the swords as light sabers for our Star Wars guys. It was the only time we could be impolite at a restaurant table.

At my grandparents’ house, my grandmother had a steel guitar. It was gorgeous and I had never seen anything like it: a guitar made from metal! And the sound it produced was not like those humdrum wooden things. This guitar was meant to be strummed like a banjo. To feel the vibration in your skull, behind your ears, you needed to get Grandma to play that thing. She knew two songs: Blue Hawaii, the Don Ho version, and On the Good Ship Lollipop, music by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Sidney Clare, as made famous by Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes.

My cousin, who became a dance studio owner in Calgary and has taught thousands of children to dance, some of whom have even become professionals, danced to Good Ship Lollipop at one of her early recitals. We all had to watch the video on Betamax one year.

I later inherited a car from that cousin. A Ford Tempo. The car’s name was Shirley. Shirley Tempo.

Whenever I get sushi at a certain place here in Winnipeg (where sushi is better than any other town, but that’s another article), I order my daughter a Shirley Temple. She marinates cherries at the bottom of her glass, as though they were tequila worms.

How many people can say they met Shirley Temple? But even today, she’s around us. Perhaps most impressively, Shirley Temple overcame celebrity to become what appeared to be a functioning human being, with a full life, and not all that cloyingly sweet.