A Little Chooba Diamond on Her Hand.
Drawing by Julie Seyler
BY BOB SMITH
Have you ever heard of the Chooba diamond? I invented it when I was 11.
In 1965, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons had a pretty big hit on pop radio with a song called, “Let’s Hang On.” It’s a bouncy anthem about love gone wrong featuring Valli’s powerful falsetto, and one of the verses begins like this:
That little chip of diamond on your hand
Ain’t a fortune baby but you know it stands
For the love (A love to tie and bind ya)
Such a love (We just can’t leave behind us) …
The chorus exhorts the girlfriend to:
Hang on to what we’ve got
Don’t let go girl, we got a lot
Got a lotta love between us
Hang on, hang on, hang on
To what we’ve got.”
Somehow, I misunderstood the first line of that verse. I thought Frankie said, “that little Chooba diamond on your hand,” instead of “chip of:”
I’d had zero experience with diamonds (or engagement rings, or girls, for that matter), so I assumed Chooba was a designation of origin for a rare type of diamond unknown to me. The “ain’t a fortune baby” line made sense because he did say “little,” after all. So in my quaint understanding, Frankie had purchased an engagement ring for his girl set with a minuscule, but nonetheless highly-prized and mysterious, “Chooba diamond.”
This was decades before the Internet, so I couldn’t simply Google “Chooba diamond,” and find out how wrong I was. (The first line of the Google search results for “Chooba diamond” yields the faintly sarcastic, “Did you mean, ‘choose a diamond?'” Similar snarky results come up for the alternate spelling, “Chuba.” And I never bothered to look it up in the dictionary, because I assumed Chooba was an exotic vernacular reference that wouldn’t appear there. (It doesn’t.)
Not wanting to appear unsophisticated, I didn’t dare ask anyone in my family or any of my friends to explain the word. It didn’t seem to be an issue to anyone but me. Hey, if everyone else accepted “Chooba diamond,” who was I to argue? I just played it cool, tapped my feet to the song when it came on the radio, and silently sang “Chooba diamond” to myself, imagining that someday I would become a man of the world, and learn exactly what kind of diamond that was.
It was 15 years before I learned the truth. I was in my first year of law school, in the midst of a divorce, and just starting to date Maria. I had only a part-time job, and was paying nominal rent to live in a spare room in a friend’s apartment. I was essentially penniless. Nonetheless, I badly wanted to get Maria a gift for Christmas. I went to the local jewelry store with the entire $30 that was at my disposal, and picked out a ring that consisted of a single silver wire looped around a sliver of garnet. She opened the box on Christmas day, dutifully oohed and ahhed, and slipped it on her finger. You could hardly see it.
“That’s so sweet,” she said. “You’re like Frankie Valli and that little chip of diamond.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know: “‘That little chip of diamond on your hand, ain’t a fortune baby, but you know it stands,'” she sang, humming the rest.
I understood immediately. I had bought her a Chooba garnet.
The Write Side of 59 
Hysterical. Here’s my mashing of lyrics: I mistook this line in The Allman Bros., “Ramblin’ Man”: “And I was born in a Greyhound bus,” for, “And I was born in a Raammbler.”
And mine was from Jimi Hendrix: “Excuse me while I kiss this guy!” – Vicki LaBella
I can sympathize with that, obviously. There was another 60’s song by Friend & Lover called “Reach Out of the Darkness” where the chorus is worded slightly differently – they sing “reach out in the darkness.” I thought it was “freak out in the garden,” like they were telling you to go have a bad drug experience in the back yard.
My mishearing was about Aretha Franklin’s 1967 mega hit “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi6dqhi8Ptw.
I was 12. I thought she was belting out “You make me feel like a menstrual woman” because that was what being a woman, not a girl, was about. But I also remember thinking those can’t be the words. Like Bob said in “Chooba”, it was way too embarassing to ask.
Meanwhile let’s have a contest on the most flubbed reinterpretation of a song.
Thats very funny, I thought the Rolling Stones album “Let it Bleed” was also about the same thing.
Speaking of mis-hearing things on the radio, you may remember the WABC afternoon disk jockey Dan Ingram. He had a jingle that just sang his name very quickly in a descending scale — Dan Ingram! He would use it between records sometimes. Well I was listening to WABC in the early ’70s with a friend. He looked perplexed when he heard the jingle and asked what that was all about. He thought they were saying “Standing Room.”
I wonder whatever happened to Dan Ingram.
“She was a STATE TROOPER….one way ticket,yeah
it took me sooooo long to find out…I found out…….”
I thought “Good Lovin'” was “Doodlebug” and that “Ticket to Ride” was “Chicken to Ride.”