All parents traumatise their children in one way or another. Spare a thought, though, for Moon Unit Zappa. She had to tiptoe around her quiet-please, musical-genius-at-work father, Frank Zappa. She also had to placate her permanently furious mother, Gail, and deal with the obvious social challenge of being called Moon Unit. But worse was to come in her childhood: fame, of sorts.
At 13 she found a way to amuse her parents by imitating the drawling speech of the popular girls at her school in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles in the early 1980s. One bubbly extrovert in a white miniskirt fascinated her in particular, gushing such expressions as “Barf me out” and “Gag me with a spoon.” Moon Unit’s father then made a recording of her stream-of-consciousness Valley Girl speak and put it to music. Then things went, like, grody to the max.
