College

Passing Notes with Lenny

/ Deb / 1 Comment

I started packing my daughter’s lunch again this year. Somewhere around middle school, my kids had taken over primary responsibility for packing their lunches. But now my son is away at college, it’s my daughter’s senior year and she’s returned to school after 18 months of remote learning, and I am keenly aware of the fact that we soon will be empty-nesters. So packing her lunch just feels right.

We’ve settled in to a nice morning routine. I pack her lunch, we chat about our upcoming day, and I help her get out the door to school. Taking a page from my dad’s playbook, sometimes I’ll go out and warm up her car or scrape her windows.

Yesterday morning we were listening to KEXP over cantaloupe, and an old Lenny Kravitz song came on. Our day was now off to a great start! I thanked John Richards out loud, turned it up, and told my daughter of my Lenny memories. In what must have been my sophomore year in college, Lenny had just released his first album and was doing a publicity tour. He was doing an autograph session at Tower Records on The Ave of the University District in Seattle, barely a block from our apartment. My bestie/roommate was the driving force in getting us there, as she owned the album. There was a line that snaked along the aisles, and there he sat, at the rear of the store under a poster, oozing coolness. When it was our turn, we mumbled hello, Lenny signed her cassette tape, and we went on about our day, which likely included a muffin at Muffin Break, or a slice at Pag’s. Years later, I saw Lenny Kravitz in concert at the Paramount with my sister, and he was just as fabulous as I wanted him to be. I recall that he did a Jesus pose at center stage (which you absolutely should always do if you are a rock star), and the crowd went wild. My daughter chuckled at the story, and off she went.

I recently started my annual cleanout/purge/re-organize effort. I’ve previously admitted that I am a sentimental hoarder, and I have boxes of things from my childhood and young adult life. But I’m trying to be more intentional about what I save, so it was time to go through a bin of old high school items and see what could go. I had a box of old notes from friends that made for a hilarious afternoon of reading about things I had forgotten (oh, the drama of the senior year Homecoming dance! How on earth did we ever make it through?). Most were mundane day-to-day musings about lunch plans and classroom events, prompting my daughter to ask, “wait, did you write these during class?” I said of course we did (duh), and when you saw your friend in the hallway between classes, you would pass the note to them. It was the 1980’s version of texting, before anyone could envision that something like text messages would ever exist.

With my hoarding habit exposed, I was surprised when my daughter observed that it was cool that I have these physical items as a snapshot of my life back then. Her communications with her friends exist only in the ether of electronic messages, and there will be no box for her to sit and go through someday with her daughter on a rainy afternoon. I told her that she can always change that, and write a note or letter to her friends. Maybe she will.

I texted with my friend yesterday, asking if she remembered the Lenny autograph session (she did), but I forgot to ask if she still has the tape. I hope she does. I still buy physical copies of albums, and I have all of my old vinyl, CD, and cassette tapes. After going through the box of high school things, I tossed all of the notes from old boyfriends, but I ended up keeping the ones from my friends. And OF COURSE I have a box of letters from my college days — hometown news from my parents and younger sisters — that I will never get rid of. So look out, college kids and soon-to-be college kids who are related to me…..old school letters are coming your way.

With all of this nostalgia for pen and paper rattling in my head, I wrote a note to my daughter in our old write-and-pass-back journal from years ago. In honor of the tradition of high school note writing, I penned my first new entry with “W/B”, but of course was careful to include a notation to her, explaining that this means “write back”. And she did.

Keep Hope Alive

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It always amuses me when a song that has no meaning to me jumps in to tell me something.  And I usually listen.  I mean, if a totally random song to which I have no emotional attachment shows up out of nowhere at the perfect time, there has to be a reason.  Right?

Anyway, yesterday I was on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Washington, to hear a Political Science faculty panel discussion about next week’s midterm elections.  I took the light rail from my office downtown, hopped off at Husky Stadium, and walked up Rainier Vista to campus.  On a clear day, true to its name, Rainier Vista provides an unobstructed view of the mountain, framed by the Gothic architecture of campus, with Drumheller Fountain lying at its base.  It’s beautiful.  Yesterday was cloudy though, giving no hint of the mountain lying behind the clouds.   Seemed more fitting, somehow.  The past few days have been strange.

I was wearing headphones, but my playlist had been exhausted, and random songs began to appear from, I assume, some sort of Spotify channel.  My phone was in my pocket, and I was too indifferent to change the music.  I wasn’t really concentrating on it anyway.   Instead, I was thinking about my son, and how he is starting to look at colleges.  How I hope that he will find a place where he is as happy as I was during my time at UW.   How he will be in college, and able to vote in the 2020 election, and that I hope the political climate will be better than it is now.  I remembered seeing Jesse Jackson speak on campus, in what must have been the fall of my freshman year, right on Rainier Vista where I was now walking.

One of the things I always love about being on campus is that it is a touchstone — a reminder of my younger self.  I mean, music always does that anyway (“Express Yourself, 2012 Style”).   Of course, back then, it was hard to picture that I would ever be as old as I am now, but here we are.

My mind clicked back to the music for a second, in time to hear that Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” was playing.  Just in time to catch the line:  “How on earth did I get so jaded/Life’s mystery seems so faded”.

I sat with that one for a moment.  I have been in my head a lot lately.    And while I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as jaded, I do have my moments.  I can always use a reminder to focus on the good things which are always there, even if they are momentarily obscured.  Just like Mount Rainier, behind those darn clouds.

Free (Fallin’) Association

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Early morning in the car, traveling to Vancouver for a work obligation.   Can’t say that I mind the solitude of a three-hour drive, and the space that it provides.

I toggle through the radio stations until something sticks: Tom Petty, “Free Fallin”. And then comes the same memory that it always conjures up for me: road trip to an early 90’s Apple Cup in Pullman, in a rented RV. Most of us are busy with keg cups and Tom Petty in the back of the RV, while one lonely friend has drawn the unenviable task of driving our sorry drunk asses across the state. In the snow. (Also musically relevant to that trip: “Radar Love”). In all fairness, however, there were two Apple Cup road trips, and the two have mostly merged in my brain as one memory, with the exception of the game outcomes.

Thankful that I am not in a beer-soaked RV on this morning, these things now come to mind:

  1. I can’t believe there was a rental company who would rent an RV to a bunch of kids in their early 20’s;
  2. Thank you Karl, for driving, which had to have sucked almost as much as whatever damage deposit you probably didn’t get back;
  3. Damn, I really should have gone to see Tom Petty in concert at some point before it was too late.
 
 
 

In Defense of Baked Goods

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I had not given Hostess Bakery much thought in many years, until the announcement of their recent demise. Even then, however, my thoughts did not turn to sugary goodness, but to the realization that, without Hostess, there will be an entire generation of college kids to whom the following pop culture reference makes no sense — my favorite band name of all time:  “Breakfast Bake Shop”.

I only knew one of its members in a tangential sort of way, but my understanding is that the name was appropriate on all levels.  If you keyed in on the ‘bake’ portion of that name, you’d be right.  They were not referring to Hostess fruit pies.

Keep in mind that this was the early 90’s in Seattle, when you were in the minority if you were not in a band.  These were the days of house parties, when word of the party was spread the old fashioned way (flyers! telephone poles!).  You bought a keg cup for $3 (sometimes free if you were a girl), and if things worked out well for the hosts, the party covered the costs of the kegs and provided seed money for the next one.

I was friends with some guys living in such a party house — actually, two different houses over the years, with a rotating cast of roommates.  Parties at Amityville and The White House were a regular weekend occurrence.  Often, bands would play at these parties….. haphazard bands with names like Celibate Twist and Breakfast Bake Shop.  I’m fairly certain that most of these bands never played a gig anywhere other than their buddies’ houses, but that was OK.

My memories of those parties, I’m sure, have morphed over the years.  They have taken on a mythical quality, and I am keenly aware that they are best viewed in the rosy glow of hindsight. My memories exist in snippets, in hazy vignettes. A beer-soaked floor that your feet stuck to.  Steam rising from sweaty bodies in a crowded, dark room.  A muddy basement, the floor above us bouncing in synch with pounding music and feet.  Watching my friend, a Cure fan, joining a band on stage and singing “Just Like Heaven”. On a different night, watching a band side-stage, leaning against the amps with my friend, who was dreamily eyeing the striped shirt-clad drummer.  She was into drummers.  I’ve always been more of a guitar girl.

I couldn’t tell you what kind of music Breakfast Bake Shop played, or whether they had any original songs.  I just remember dubbing their name as my favorite, which was no small feat.  Bands were everywhere, each striving to have a name more clever than the next.   Reading the “What’s Happening” column in The University of Washington Daily was a must, not because we intended to go and see those bands, but in order to see their names.  I have it on good authority that writers at The Daily would often make up names of bands that didn’t actually exist.

Once, as a full grown adult in a fit of nostalgia, I ate a Hostess Twinkie. It was awful. The creamy filling was nothing like I had remembered it. Just like those parties, I suppose it should have stayed in the past as a tasty memory.

Even now, in the post-Hostess era, my husband I still declare it when we think something would be a good band name.  But I always forget to write them down, so if I ever started a band, I don’t have a list to work from. And besides, I don’t think I could do any better than Breakfast Bake Shop. 

Garage Regret, 20 Years Later

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Twenty years ago when Kurt died, I was in law school and living in Tacoma.  I recall driving down the hill on my way to work, towards Commencement Bay, and hearing it on the radio.  The sky was blindingly blue – one of those crystal clear, early spring days when it seems like it should be warm outside, but isn’t.  It wasn’t yet confirmed to be Kurt, but of course everyone knew it was.  My stomach dropped, and I very clearly remember thinking that it was too beautiful of a day to be lying dead in a room above a garage.

As the weeks (and years) went on, regret loomed.  As a music lover and Seattle resident since 1988, I am almost embarrassed to say that I never saw Nirvana play live.  I had plenty of opportunities, including the infamous “Four Bands for Four Bucks” shows at the UW Hub while I was in college there.  I had a friend who sported a Nirvana sticker on his VW bug long before “Nevermind”.  He saw them plenty of times.  At the time I remember considering him somewhat of a slacker, but now I think he’s a goddamn genius.  I graduated, moved to Tacoma for law school, and a Nirvana show just never seemed to work out for me. I barely remember that I once had access to a ticket, and then couldn’t go, for some reason which must have been important at the time.

I took my kids to the EMP recently, and we toured the Nirvana exhibit.  They enjoy music and of course know about Nirvana, so they were interested.  They listened to my stories as I pointed out the great artifacts and pictures in the exhibit.  This was my time, my youth, my Seattle. I was excited to show them.  But at 9 and 11, my kids lack the emotional connection that I have to that music, to that slice of history.  Plus they don’t understand that parental reaction of – “20 DAMN YEARS! FUCK! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?  HOW is it POSSIBLE that I can remember that time so vividly, and now in the blink of an eye it’s 20+ years later and I’m looking at all of this stuff, IN A MUSEUM, with two tweens, and wiry grey hairs poking out of my head?”

I realized instantly that, for me, the EMP’s Jimi Hendrix exhibit was the mirror image.  I like his music, and I appreciate the impact he made, but I don’t have an emotional connection to that time.  I toured the exhibit politely, but I didn’t have earnest stories or reactions to the displays, like the people nearby, 20 years my senior, who had lived through his music.

And that is the cyclical nature of things, of course.  On the huge screen in the Sky Church down the hall, a Macklemore video played.  People gathered and watched.  My kids ran down the hall to see.  I had taken my 11 year old to see Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in concert back in December.  It was my son’s first “real” concert, and he had a blast.  I did too.  Our evening was precious to me in the way that only a lover of live music can understand.  (And I feel I’ve properly set him up for the “what was your first concert?” discussion down the road.  Mine was Night Ranger….not exactly the same).   Truthfully, I wanted to see Macklemore as much as my son did.  He feels like a Seattle artist whom you ought to see when you have a chance.

So I’m trying to do better on the regret front, at least where my kids are concerned.  I let them skip school and took them to the Seahawks Super Bowl victory parade in February, mainly because I figured they will remember it in 20 years, a lot more than anything they would have done in school that day.  You know – kind of the opposite of thinking about an elusive Nirvana ticket, and not being able to remember why you didn’t go.

Even Sadder Than a Wedding Dress in a Thrift Store….

/ Deb / 1 Comment
Just a few of the many treasures awaiting you at the Ballard Goodwill

….it turns out, is a mix tape in a thrift store.  I never realized this until I found a stack of them at my local Goodwill.  I was intrigued by the one called “Wedding Music/Favorite Love Songs #1″, so I picked it up (What happened?! Was the wedding cancelled?).  I glanced at the list of songs only long enough to see Mariah Carey well-represented, but then I felt compelled to put it down.  It was too much like reading someone’s diary.  I couldn’t do it.

Ah, mix tapes.  Our kids will never know the magic of a mix tape.  They will craft digital playlists, I’m sure.  But nothing so time-stamped and permanent as a mix tape with their handwriting on it.

I freely admit that I am a sentimental hoarder.  I’ve got all of my old tapes, even my earliest mix tapes made with my sister and cousin (if you can really call them mix tapes… really it was just us talking into a Panasonic tape recorder, telling stupid stories and singing songs).

Another gem is the “Workout Mix” tape that I made in college, with appropriate-tempo songs for a routine of exercises.   Given that it was 1989, of course the lineup included INXS, Prince, and Neneh Cherry.  The last song, the “cool down”, was – what else – “Nite & Day” by Al B Sure.

Then there was the mix tape trilogy made for a post-college road trip (“Driving Tape #1, #2, and #3”, of course.)   Number 1 has got you covered with your basic R.E.M, Pearl Jam, and U2, with some Naughty by Nature thrown in for reasons I don’t recall.  Number 2 was the mellow tape, with Luther Vandross and Johnny Gill – you know, for when the road asked you, “come on, let’s bring it down now….”.   Number 3, sadly, is no longer with us.  But it’s quite possible that it contained country music.

My favorite mix tape, though, is one that my long-distance boyfriend sent me in college.  Oddly enough, I only remember one song on it – “Cars that Go Boom”, by  L’trimm (wasn’t he romantic?).   But what I love about that tape is that, inter-mixed with songs, my boyfriend talked about what was going on in his apartment, or what he was studying.  He introduced each song like a DJ. “Cars that Go Boom” reminded him, he said, of me and my best friend/roommate (were we like “Tigra & Bunny”?).   I haven’t listened to the tape since then, but I love the idea that his 1989 voice is preserved on it.  I can’t even remember what his voice sounded like then.  I’m saving the tape like a fine bottle of wine.   Someday the time will be right, and he and I will listen to it with all the reverence it deserves (through a series of twists and turns, we ended up getting married years later.)

I really hope that the mix tapes I made for others never made their way onto a thrift store shelf (in the garbage = fine!).  And now I’m feeling like I should have purchased those thrift store mix tapes and given them a proper burial.  I need to think more about that one.   As should you — what mix tapes do you treasure, and what mix creations of yours might still be floating around out there?

In the mean time, though, welcome to McMahon Hall, and enjoy the mellow grooves of Al B Sure (closing your eyes and pretending that it’s on a cassette tape, of course).

Express Yourself, 2012 Style

/ Deb / 1 Comment

One thing irritates me like no other:  the Music Snob.  You know the type – they only like the coolest bands that no one else has heard of, or claim to only like music done by “true artists” or “good musicians” (read:  no pop, no Top 40).  I am not a Music Snob.  I like a lot of different music, and I won’t disparage you for what you like. 

Behold:  today’s post is about Salt ‘n Pepa.  You Music Snobs know who they are, so don’t pretend otherwise.

In 1990, Salt ‘n Pepa’s “Expression” was a mainstay on my Walkman.  I was in college and worked part-time at the prosecutor’s office, and rode the Metro bus to and from campus and work, every day.  A Walkman was essential in order to avoid having to talk to any weird older men who might sit next to you on the bus.  I really loved that song; I must have listened to it a million times.  (Favorite line?  “Yes I’m blessed and I know/who I am/I express myself on every jam/I’m not a man but I’m in command/hot damn, I got an all-girl band”).                                 

Soon thereafter, with the onslaught of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, et. al., my flirtation with rap and hip-hop ended.  My DJ/rapper nickname was cast aside (email me and I’ll tell you what it was), and my Salt n’ Pepa cassette was relegated to a box.  I decided I wanted to become a lawyer….went to law school,  got married, had kids, blah blah blah……20 years passed.  Cut to present day Seattle, on a path around Greenlake:

I honestly forgot that I ever loaded the song onto iTunes or put it on my workout mix.  I don’t think I’ve heard it in years.  But today, on my run, for the first time ever – the Shuffle Gods went to work, and there it was – Salt ‘n Pepa, speaking to me in scratches and beats:

“Hey, you used to be that girl on the bus…..you carried a leather bookbag and had big dreams and a five year plan.  How’d that all work out for you?  Are you where you want to be?  Have you done what you set out to do?  How realistic were the plans of a 20 year-old anyway?   You can laugh at the 20 year-old You and how she didn’t know anything, but she’s still out there on a bus somewhere, and you need to settle up with her”.

Enough already, Salt! (and Pepa.  And Spinderella)  As if I wasn’t already introspective enough, as a result of the new year and an unexpected event in my family, now here you go, poking me with your catchy grooves.  OK, I will play along.  January is always a time for cleaning out and purging.  Why else would all the stores have organizational items on sale, and all the diet centers run specials?   More importantly, though, it’s also a time for mental housecleaning – to satisfy that list-maker in all of us.  

Much like a Metro bus route, our lives will always be filled with delays, detours, and some dead ends.  But the end result is that I don’t need any do-overs.  I’m ecstatically happy with the past 20 years, potholes and all.  I am looking forward to 2012 in a way that I haven’t done in a long time.  It is full of promise, full of new beginnings, and chock-full of big plans, both personally and professionally.

It might have taken me 20 years to realize that, in the end, you really are only accountable to yourself.  Or, as it were, to your 20-year old self on a bus.  I’d still like to buy that girl a cup of coffee and talk to her, but otherwise, I think we’ve settled up.

Alive….Encore Break

/ Deb / 2 Comments

Twenty years, holy cow.  Pearl Jam’s “Alive” was released as a single on August 2, 1991.  In honor, it feels like maybe it’s time to release this one from the vault.

Originally written in 2003, it was, in a lot of ways, the precursor to what would later become Corduroy Notes (figured out the origin of the name yet?  Let me know if you have a guess).

And, by way of update, I still can’t believe that I almost broke up with Pearl Jam.  The career drama is a now a mere footnote, and I am thankful to be back in contact with my friend — we still talk PJ, and scratch our heads at the fact that 20 years have passed since our first show.

I’m Still Alive

 Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about music. It’s funny how, while a recording preserves a musical performance, a song also serves to record the events that occur in our lives.

“Dust in the Wind” will forever be a darkened Stevens Junior High cafeteria, and a dance with an older 9th grade boy whom I had a major crush on.  Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” = a McMahon Hall lounge, new friends, and the first time I ever saw a beer bong. Likewise, though, other artists have been entirely ruined for me just by their association with bad memories: The Steve Miller Band, Jimmy Buffet, and Hootie & the Blowfish all have found their way into this category (no great losses there).

Which brings up an interesting part of the ending of a relationship: the question of who gets custody of the music. Not the physical CD’s and albums, but the memories associated with them, the ownership of those times. For awhile, I thought that Pearl Jam would find its way into the Steve Miller-Jimmy Buffet-Hootie camp. When a long-term friendship ended a few years ago, I didn’t listen to Eddie and the boys for a long, long time. It was too painful; nearly every song represented some memory of the “us” that was no longer – all the Pearl Jam shows we had attended together, and the Seattle music mania that had gripped us both so many years earlier.

Ultimately, I realized that I could take ownership of those memories and experiences for myself, with or without him in my life. Of course, maybe it was the music that made me do it — giving up The Steve Miller Band is one thing. Giving up Pearl Jam is quite another.

Like many others, I own the entire Pearl Jam catalog, and I love it all. But one song still endures as my favorite. “Alive” was their first song to hit the airwaves, and I was a senior in college at UW — that time in the early 90’s when, as Seattle-centric twenty-somethings, we believed that Seattle had become the center of the music universe (and maybe it was, for awhile).

I remember the first few times that I heard “Alive” – this song, this band – I was hooked right away. I talked to my L.A.-based boyfriend, and asked him if he had heard this new song – from some band named Pearl Jam, and they were from…. Seattle!  Where I lived! I tried to sing the song to him to see if he recognized it. He didn’t. At least not yet.

Since then, I have always had a special relationship with “Alive”. It seems to show up when I need it most — little blips on the radar screen of my life. I vividly remember getting off the bus, opening my mailbox and finding my law school acceptance letter – while listening to it on my Walkman. Three years later, driving home on the day my Bar Exam results were to arrive, there it was again. And again, after a particularly bad job interview, while lost in downtown Seattle in my half-broken-down car in the rain, there was Eddie on the radio, singing my song.

These days, the Seattle music craze has long passed, and you really don’t hear old Pearl Jam on the radio very much anymore, even here in Seattle.

Recently, my husband and I were having lunch and discussing my latest career drama: whether I should leave my law firm, do something else, or quit working entirely and stay home with our 8 month-old son. I was stressed out, and questioning whether I wanted to practice law anymore. I realized that I was at a crossroads — with not just my needs to consider, but that of my son and our little family.

On my way back from lunch, my husband called me. “Turn on 107.7”, he said.

There it was: Eddie Vedder, belting out the anthem of my youth, all at once giving me a glimpse of the girl I was ten years ago, how far I had come, and reminding me that, as always, things will work out as they should.

I turned up the stereo, rolled down my window, and sang along.

Quality Time in the Back of a Van

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Only two of my major life decisions have an exact date of origin, meaning that I can pinpoint exactly when they were made.    One of these is the decision to not move back to my home town.

Since New Year’s Eve, I’ve had U2 on the brain.  (“A 1987 Bono for the New Year”).   I’ve pulled out all of the old albums, so it was only a matter of time before this nugget came my way.

There is a short list of music that I associate with the Fall of my Freshman year of college, for all the obvious and not-so-obvious reasons:  R.E.M., Guns n’ Roses, and U2, with a dash of The Doors on the side.  These were the albums playing in the dorm halls, fueling our parties, and bonding us with new friends.

U2’s Rattle and Hum was released that fall, and for many of us, it was cause for an expedition out of the dorms, to purchase it at Tower Records on the Ave  (on cassette tape, of course.  And by the way…..R.I.P. Tower Records).    The day it came out, you could walk down the hallways of McMahon Fifth South and hear it wafting from every other door.

Those first few months away from home, I didn’t have reason to venture much farther than the University District.   But my RA had an internship that gave her access to free passes to movie premieres.  When she scored enough tickets, we headed out of the U District for the night (one of these outings, of course, was to see the U2 movie “Rattle and Hum”).  The movies were held at theaters all over town, giving me a chance to see other parts of the city.

On the night when the Big Decision was made, whatever movie we were seeing was playing at Uptown Theatre on lower Queen Anne.  I had never been to Queen Anne, although I would later live there for four years.  We piled into a van, and I loved the feeling of not knowing where we were going, and not being in charge of getting us home.  I was along for the ride.

We traveled down I-5, towards the sparkling lights of downtown – very far from the wheatfields and desert vistas of my hometown.  I had never consciously thought of it, but maybe in the back of my head, I assumed that, after college, I would move back home.

But on this night, looking out that van window, I thought to myself:  This is my city now. 

In a strange way, the world just opened up.  I said to myself — I don’t have to move back there.  I could live here (or anywhere else), forever.   And in that moment, I knew that I would never again live in my hometown. 

I had fallen in love with a city.  The hook set even further with the onset of grunge music a few years later, when Seattle became the self-proclaimed music capital of the world (and maybe it was, for a while).  If there was a better place to be in college during those years, I don’t know where it was.    

I’ve now lived in Seattle longer than I lived in my hometown, a milestone that did not go unnoticed.  The University District haunts that I knew are mostly gone.   The entire city has cocktail lounges where once there were dive bars, and the grimiest of my old college bars, although still in business, now proclaims itself to be a “nightclub”.  I’ve watched the influx of California and East Coast transplants, with their incessant whining about the rain.    But I still don’t see myself living anywhere else.

And the other life decision with a precise point of origin?   I’m keeping that one to myself, but I will say that, in true Pacific Northwest fashion, it happened on a crystal clear September day, on a trail about halfway up the side of Mt. Rainier.

The Opposite of doing a Beer Bong

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Imagine that it’s 1989 and you are a freshman in college.  You’ve gotten a job at the athletic rec center on campus, and the only shift available is the worst time for any college student to be at work:  Friday night, 7pm to 11pm.

Your job involves sitting at a front desk and clicking a counter when patrons come in and show their ID.  There are not many people coming in to exercise at this time, except for professors and grad students.  Even worse, your two co-workers are dating each other, and are too busy playing grab-ass to talk to you.

Now imagine that, for some strange leftover disco-era reason, there is roller skating on Friday nights in one of the gyms.  It is attended by the aforementioned grad students, professors, and 70’s holdouts.  I’m talking full-on Skate King mode: disco lights, music pumping — and it’s so loud that it can be heard as far as the front desk.  Songs are recognizable by their bass line, thumping through the wall.    You sit every Friday, eavesdropping on this music, imagining your friends up the hill, who are most certainly having more fun than you are.   What stage of partying is going on up there?   What fun hijinks are occurring in your absence?

There is one song that is played every Friday, several times throughout the course of your shift.   It is unmistakable, as its distinctive “Woo!” comes through the wall, taunting you as the hours roll by:  none other than “It Takes Two”, by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock.  Twenty years later, you still hear that song and are immediately transported back.

Welcome to my little slice of 1989 Friday night hell…. (and did I mention that it was accompanied by the pungent odor of funky B.O.?)