"Perfect Strangers" - Deep Purple/"In The Still of the Night" - Whitesnake

Randy and I took the boys and two of their friends to see Deep Purple (backed by a 38 piece orchestra) at the Beacon Theater in NYC last week -- this was Tyler's birthday present.  He is crazy about Deep Purple.  He is so crazy about Deep Purple that if they have a band member that was singing on a certain album he likes (such as, Glenn Hughes) he will go and find all of THAT guy's other bands and end up being really into them.  Which is why I had to tell him we were not driving to Buffalo to see Black Country Communion the other day.  And we're not driving to Rochester to see Judas Priest, either, but that's another story.

I'm not a big fan of the Purp, but there was this one summer when I was listening a lot to their Greatest Hits cassette in the sweltering non-air conditioned bedroom I shared with my little sister.  They had just had their 80's "comeback" and their two 80's songs were also on this hits album.  I liked "Hush" and "Perfect Strangers" the best.  There was something dark and twisted about the music in this song that fit in with that deep unsettled feeling I was walking around with that summer.

It was 1988, I had just turned 19 years old.  I was mostly focused on boys, partying, and hiding out from my concerned mother. I was sort of attending Western CT State University and I was working at the Mall and sometimes at Food Bag - a convenience store that made fried chicken and sold gas.

Food Bag was at an intersection of a few diverse neighborhoods, when I was growing up, Beaver St. in Danbury had low income housing and was the closest thing to "projects" that my town had.  In the other direction was a very strongly Portuguese neighborhood and large old Victorian houses that had been converted to apartments and were full of drunk college kids and other people who needed tons of roommates to pay the rent.  Food Bag was at the center of all this, the spoke in the wheel.  We were so busy all the time that it could get pretty comical.

I got in trouble a few times - once for making crazy faces at the security camera (because I believed nobody looked at it) and another for writing "Turkey Boob" on the sandwich labels instead of "Turkey Breast".  But hey, I was a very imaginative person stuck in drudgery, what else was I going to do?  We have millions of stories from Food Bag - my brother worked there too for a while.  The hours were perfect for a college student and it didn't require a lot of brains, just common sense and a cool head.

Right around this summer I was spending a lot of time with my coworker Dee from Food Bag - we clicked within minutes of meeting each other and were thick as thieves.  We would always try to get into bars and be thrown out unceremoniously because she had a slew of older brothers and a lot of people knew who she was.  We did find this one place that let us in, so many times we'd drink at her house before loading up a car and going over to North Salem around midnight to go to this place called "Whitney's".  Oh man, was that a freakshow.

Danbury is on the border of Brewster, New York, and there are two very different liquor laws between the states.  In CT, bars close at 1 on weeknights, 2 on weekends.  No booze of any kind is sold after 8pm or on Sundays. In New York, you can buy beer whenever and liquor before 9pm (at least that's how it was in the 80's-90's, being a sober alcoholic, I have no idea what's going on now).  Bars were open until 4am EVERY NIGHT.  Party animals from CT would say they were going "on a Brewster run" which meant they ran out of beer.  We also would close the bar in our town and then a caravan of drunk idiots would go across the border to the first bars we could find to keep it going until 4:00am.  Whitney's was one of those bars -- so it didn't get busy until after 1 in the morning.  We got there around midnight to secure a stool at the bar and to flirt with the bartender who is the reason we were able to get in there in the first place-- he thought Dee was cute.  Some guy used to go there dressed in an opera cape and introduced himself as "Lestat" and he kept asking if I wanted to live forever.  I also had a marriage proposal from someone who told me he wanted to make me his "African Queen".  Which is hilarious, because I am of German descent.  We loved it there, not just for the fact that we could actually GET IN, but because insane stuff kept happening and one thing Dee and I loved was the weird.  It seemed like when it was just the two of us, the weirdest stuff happened.  That also happened with my future roommate Jenn.  I know I'm the common denominator, but I honestly thing it was the chemistry between me and these two friends of mine that attracted bizarre people, conversations, and opportunities.

My mother was none too thrilled with this lifestyle of mine - and I was living at home - so I did a lot of sleeping over at Dee's so my mother wouldn't have to worry waiting for me to come home at 4:30am and also so I wouldn't have to hear it.

At the same time, I was hanging out with Mothra when she wasn't with her boyfriend and somehow we had reconnected with this kid Jay that was a few years younger than us.  They rode the same bus in grade school and high school and he always had a wicked huge crush on her.  I started flirting with him for the hell of it and next thing I know, I ended up kind of having a bona fide crush on him.  It made me feel wrong because he was a senior in high school.  He was also one of those guys that was cynical and mocking all the time.  I had no business crushin' on him, but I did.

We would talk on the phone late into the night, and I was FRAUGHT with tension.  He flirted but wouldn't bust any moves at all.  Then one night, it all escalated to a "dare" and he DARED me to walk to his street (which was just about a mile away) and he would meet me on the corner and we would...what? Make out?  Yes, make out.  And that's what I did.  I crawled out my bedroom window in the middle of the night to walk a mile -- I don't remember why I didn't just drive, maybe my car was messed up? -- in the pitch black windy roads of my neighborhood to make out with this twisted high school kid.  It didn't ease my crush at all because the kid was a great kisser.

So of course, this song, which was still pretty popular that year, always makes me think of the lengths I went to when I was still so demented I would go so totally out of my way just to kiss a guy:

I still get slight erotic flashbacks when I hear it.  Not so much because of Jay, but of how I was so drunk on frustrated lust.  I would listen to this song over and over. The album "Whitesnake", Guns and Roses "Appetite for Destruction" and Deep Purple's greatest hits were the soundtrack to that summer.

There's a P.S.  Later that winter things with Jay went south (we never really dated and made out a few times but were more friends than anything MORE than friends, which frustrated me at the time), but not before he, Dee and I went on a 'scavenger hunt' one night driving around taking photos of random people and making up insane stories and ending up throwing a very lacy nightgown on the statue of the Virgin Mary in front of Jay's very Catholic high school.  Dee still has the photo of us laughing in front of what looks like lace on a rock - Jay took the photo.  Apparently, it was a huge scandal and none of us were caught.

I also went to see Deep Purple, well Guns and Roses really, they opened for Aerosmith and Deep Purple at Giant's Stadium, and my kid is horrified that I left about 3 songs in to the Deep Purple set.  I wasn't really there for them.  The concert last week was incredible - Steve Morse is a SICK guitar player and Ian Gillen sounds pretty good for an old man, even though he ran out of air a few times, he still could really scream.

Best Songs To Dance To At Your High School Dance, If You Are In High School In The 80's

Black Sabbath - "War Pigs"

In 1990 I had the pleasure to see Ozzy Osborne live, on his birthday.  My friend Lisa and I went, and all the way to New Haven, all the radio stations were playing various Ozzy/Black Sabbath songs, and we were laughing because we heard "War Pigs" so many times, that when the band hit those distinctive opening notes, we groaned and rolled our eyes.  Ozzy put on a great show, I think he might still have been messed up back then, but he had the whole audience in the palm of his hand.  At the end of the night, they dropped tons of balloons that said, "Happy Birthday, Ozzy" on them, I kept mine for years, despite it's deflation.

However, this song doesn't really remind me of the show.  It now reminds me of my two unofficial stepsons, Tyler, age 16 and Ryan, age 14.

Despite living in a house with two musicians passionate about music, our boys never seemed that interested in music.  At one point I asked Tyler (at about age 11) what his favorite kind of music was, and he said, "Video game music." Yes, they were very into video games, mostly fighting and samurai video games.  Then came the whole "Guitar Hero"-"Rock Band" video game craze and the guys were introduced to a bunch of music and they started doing some exploring on their own.  I'll never forget Tyler coming to me and asking me, "Have you ever heard of Meat Loaf?". 

At one point, Ryan got sick of playing plastic guitars and expressed interest in "real" guitar, so three and a half years ago, both Tyler and Ryan started taking lessons: Tyler took bass lessons, Ryan took guitar lessons (they're both awesome, by the way, and Tyler has also picked up the drums). I believe they started off liking Metallica but then found Black Sabbath and it became Black Sabbath all the time.  They've now spread out and have become big fans of Cream, Derek and the Dominoes, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Dio, Blue Oyster Cult and many other fine bands from the 70's era. 

During the Black Sabbath phase, we were all in the car heading somewhere, it doesn't matter, when "War Pigs" came on the radio.  Tyler asked us to turn it up.  The four of us then began to sing it, pretty loudly, all together.  At the end of the song, Tyler said, "That was a nice family sing-along song, wasn't it?" and I started laughing really hard.

All my life I told everybody who would listen that I didn't want kids, that I didn't have a maternal cell in my body.  I admitted I was incredibly selfish and that I wanted to be a poet rock star and would rather die than be "trapped" by a kids/a family.  I didn't hate children, I claimed that I loved them so much I knew better than to have any.  Love changed everything.

When I moved back to CT in 2002, my full intention was to regroup, save money and move back to New York City as soon as I humanly can.  What's that old saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." Yeah. 

Right after Jesus Christ Superstar,  my brother auditioned for a production of Godspell - I went along as moral support and to have something to do.  I remember hearing this guy audition through the door - he played guitar and was singing "Stray Cat Strut." He was really good.  I wanted to Jeff Gilooly him to get him out of the competition for the role of Jesus.  Matt got the role of Jesus anyway, and this guy - Randy - ended up being part of the cast.  During rehearsal, I noticed him - he was cute, but quiet.  I heard through the grapevine that he had been married, but his wife had passed away leaving him with two small boys.

Randy and I didn't really get to talking until closer to the end of the show.  We ended up sitting near each other and talking for hours at the cast parties, almost to the exclusion of everybody else.  We had lots in common -we both loved music, and we both played guitar and sang.  We decided we'd get together and jam and maybe be a band.  I really liked him a lot, but was a little afraid of the "baggage", and I figured that his widower status and kids would be enough to keep my growing romantic feelings in check - that I would still move back to New York City, but that this musical collaboration would be a nice distraction.

Eight years later, I am still with him.  I didn't count on falling in love with him.  I also didn't count on his boys being so damn charming and sweet and falling in love with them, too.  It wasn't long before I was at his house almost every night and then just changed my address. 

The funniest part about this is I am far from trapped.  I actually feel freer and MORE myself than I ever could imagine.  Some friends worried that I'd be living in the shadow of another woman, his wife, but I tell them like I told him - he loved her the way he loved her.  He's not going to love me the same way, he's loving me the way he loves me.  I do not love him in the exact same way I loved my ex, I love Randy the way I love him.  And as much as I love both boys,  I can't make up for the fact that they lost their mother, I know that I'm the next best thing but that I can't replace her.  I don't want to replace her.  She is their mother, I am the lucky woman that is now mothering them.

If you had told me 11 years ago that I was going to leave New York City, live in the rural suburbs and raise two boys, I would have laughed until I had an aneurysm. What I also would never have believed if you told me was that I would be so happy, content, and grateful.  Our family is not conventional and I am far from bored.  It's almost like God heard me and said, "Oh yeah? How about THIS family?"  and laughing, spread his wings and designed the perfect family for me.  After feeling like an "outsider" for most of my life, I have found the people I belong to.

The very fact that "War Pigs" is our in-car sing-along song proves it to me.

REM - "Losing My Religion" / Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs - "Wooly Bully"

I met Stan while working at a restaurant in the Danbury Fair Mall called "Barnabee's."  Well, actually I met him a little before that at a dive bar that pretended to be a nightclub, and we immediately clashed.  I ran into him again at a friend's party, and we didn't get along.  He gave me crap, and I gave it to him right back and next thing I know, we were totally BFFs.  Stan and I got up to all kinds of fun and trouble, I spent a lot of 1990 hanging out at his apartment on Foster Street while watching the Gulf War on TV. 

Right around the beginning of 1991, Stan told me that he wanted to see the rest of America before moving back home to England.  I sighed and said, "Wow, I wish I could do that." and Stan said, "What's stopping you?" 

I thought pretty hard -- I had some money saved for another semester at Western CT State University, I had a beat up old car, I had this amorphous relationship with a guy who didn't like me as much as I liked him, and I had a really stupid go-nowhere job that I loathed.  "Nothing." I said, with dawning hope. "Nothing is keeping me here!"

The deal was I'd provide the car and Stan and Nikki (his good friend from back home who wanted to go, too) would spring for the gas.   I sold a few things, got the car fixed up, had a very ignoble last day at work and in early March of 1991,we loaded up my ancient Toyota Corolla station wagon and we headed Southish.  We wanted to stop and see stuff along the way.  We hung around Philadelphia for a day then spent a night at my grandparent's house in York, PA where they made us a big breakfast and my grandfather let me know he was VERY CONCERNED about my safety and made me promise to stay in touch.  We drove to Washington DC and spent a few days there and got our Youth Hostel Association cards, figuring we could stay cheaply that way.  We had a copy of "Let's Go, USA!" which told us where all the hostels in each state. 

From DC we drove across VA and saw the Natural Bridge and then took the Skyline Drive.  We drove through to North Carolina where we found a youth hostel in a town called Blowing Rock -- it ended up being an Assembly of God Summer Camp, it cost us $6 for the night and for breakfast.  It was a nice quiet place and we stayed there for two days, did our laundry, drank with the locals at a bar called Ichabod's were everybody was fascinated with Stan and Nikki's accents.

We left Blowing Rock and went to Atlanta, GA - we toured the CNN building and hit the blues bars in Underground Atlanta.  Everybody sang "Ice, Ice Baby" when they saw Stan because of his spiked blond bangs.  It was right around Atlanta where we started to hear "Losing My Religion" ALL OVER THE RADIO. 

We didn't have a lot of music with us.  I had my boom box and we had about 3 CDs between us.  Stan had "Mixed Up" by the Cure, Nikki had "C+C Music Factory", and I had "Sticky Fingers" by the Rolling Stones.  And we had the radio - and non-stop REM.  We had very little overlap as far as our musical tastes, but one thing we could all agree on was the oldies station.  Whatever state we were driving through, they ALL had oldies stations.  The other song that haunted us was:

"WOOLY BULLY!!!" we'd shout along, "Wooly Bully!...Wooly Bully, Wooly Bully, Wooly Bully!"  I cannot hear this song without thinking about being in the car, endless highway in front of me.

From Atlanta we drove all night (all of us probably too drunk to drive) to New Orleans.  We left a major city in the pitch black and the sun rose as we were just passing Biloxi, MS, spanish moss hanging from the trees, egrets along the side of the very empty roads.  We pulled into the French Quarter just in time to drink a ton of coffee, find our youth hostel and pass out all day.  We spent a week there, and I barely remember it - just blurs of hazy drunken weirdness.  I remember singing some karaoke and guys running up to me demanded I grab their asses. 

We went to a unisex strip club where the men were incredible and the women were scrawny junkies sleepwalking through their routines.  One of the guys pulled himself up on a pole with one hand, wrapped his thighs around it and hung upside down.  Women were throwing hotel keys at him.  We were sitting right on the edge of the stage and he was dancing right over my head, his banana hammock inches from my forehead, I didn't want to look up - he dropped down and whispered in my ear, "Am I embarassing you?" which of course, caused me to blush to the scalp.  I have a million comebacks I could say now, but at 22, I didn't.

Nikki's Jamaican roommate gave her a huge sandwich bag of pot before we left and she didn't bother to pull it out until we were in New Orleans and we would walk up and down Bourbon Street with joints rolled as fat as cigarettes.  I was so wasted one night I ended up buying one of those Ignatius Reilly hotdogs from the hotdog cart at four in the morning, it was ice cold, but I ate it anyway.  I also ate cajun crawfish that was so explosively hot, I drank one beer for every crawfish I ate.  We all had horrible cajun spice breath for three days.

From New Orleans we drove to San Antonio, TX, followed by Andreas, a German guy we met at our youth hostel.  The four of us split a hotel room at the skankiest hotel I have ever seen and then split up.  We went to Houston to visit my friend Kirsten from Valpo.  In Houston we went to a happy hour at a bar that had such a huge spread of food, they even had a full Thanksgiving dinner.  I watched people 2-step to INXS.

Houston in our rear-view mirror, we drove our longest drive from Houston to Carlsbad, New Mexico.  I was dying to see the Carlsbad Caverns since my Dad had been talking about them my whole life.  Every time we went to ANY cave, he'd say, "This is pretty cool, but you should SEE CARLSBAD CAVERNS!" I called him collect from the cafeteria one mile below the ground.  We stayed to watch the bats fly out at sunset, thousands of them -awesome and kind of icky.

We drove from Carlsbad to Santa Fe, amused by the numerous signs about how hitchikers are mostly likely escaped prisoners, cautioning us to not pick them up.  I fell in LOVE with Taos, the town and the pueblo.  I bought a turquoise ring from a woman I could have sworn put a spell on me - her house smelled of pinon and when I walked out I felt loopy. 

On the way to Flagstaff, we drove right into a huge blizzard, one minute there was nothing on the road and the next minute, visibility was zero.  We spent the night at a youth hostel where I stayed up all night long playing a game called "guts" with two southern boys who kept saying things like, "Call, Sugarbooger!" and "All right now, little lady."  I had to tell Stan and Nikki that I had to go straight to California, I was running out of money.  They were pissed, but eventually decided to go up through Utah to meet Stan's parents at Yellowstone.  They were over visiting.  So, all alone, I drove from Flagstaff to Huntington Beach, California where I set myself up at the Colonial Inn Youth Hostel - because it was cheaper than the youth hostel in Venice.

Even though I was alone those first two weeks before Stan and Nikki showed up (and I was surprised they did, I thought they had ditched me for being lame), I was to busy exploring to really feel lonely. I felt such a sense of adventure about the whole thing - watching the sun set over the ocean, learning how wrong my misconceptions were about California (the water is COLD, people) and driving aimlessly around Hollywood, not believing I was actually there.  "Losing My Religion" reminds me of all of that. It reminds me of how fearless I have been, and curious. 

Vanity 6 - "Nasty Girl"

For one year, I attended Valparaiso University, a university that has an excellent reputation for many of its academic programs and as a bonus, is resoundingy Lutheran.  It even has a seminary school for future Lutheran clergy.   The school is located in the northwestern corner of Indiana, not far from Notre Dame or Lake Michigan, and one million miles away from any place I had ever known.

When I think back about my whole college-search, what sticks out at me now is that I really had no idea what I wanted to do.  I knew I wanted to get the hell out of Danbury, Connecticut, and whatever means to that end was okay with me.  I was really attracted to Emerson College in Boston, I loved being right in the heart of a city (not THE City, but a good one!) and some of the students had purple hair, which thrilled me, but horrified my mother. 

Ah, my mother.  Carol-Bee is a great lady and I have a ton of respect for her, but she was something of a bulldozer back then.  She knew what was best for me, and she thought that I had no idea what I was talking about when it came to my own wants, needs, dreams or desires.  I received a pretty decent discount to Valpo (as it is affectionately called) because my father was a principal of a Lutheran School.  Emerson offered no such thing, and since strange people were there anyway, my mother decided that I would go to Indiana instead of Boston. I agreed because she pretty much told me there was no way we could afford Emerson. I had visited the campus and got hammered with my friend from Immanuel, Cecil, who was there as a freshman AND I made out with a cute guy during a visiting weekend.  It seemed promising, and I had no other choice. It was about a 22 hour drive door-to-door, and in late August of 1986 my mother and sister delivered me to Kreinheder Hall, which would be my home for the next 10 months.

Kreinheder was an octagonal shaped building which meant two corner rooms were almost triangular.  My wing was One South - my window was above, to the right of where it says "Kreinheder Hall".  This was great for spying on people and being obnoxious.  One night my roommate and I would continually drop my screen down and beg a passerby to pick it up and hand it up to us.  As they were on their tiptoes and handing me the screen, my roommate would snap their photo and we would howl hysterically.  I know, but it was funny at the time, you had to be there.   

The majority of the girls on my floor (and the students in general) were from the suburbs of Chicago and were Lutheran, primarily of German/Scandinavian descent.  There were some oddballs like me from far flung places like CT or CA or TX, but we were rare.  So it was pretty homogeneous.

Midwesterners are a different breed of people from the Northeasterners.  I like to say that we New English types are reserved and might appear standoffish, but once you win us over we're loyal friends who will help you move and pick you up at the airport and tell you right away if you are trailing toilet paper from your shoe.  We won't bullshit you, once you are our friend. 

Midwesterners are super-friendly right out of the gate.  I can't tell you how many times I crossed the large grassy area of the campus everyone called "The Tundra" and someone would beam a big smile my way and say, "Hi!" and I would turn around to see if there was someone behind me they were greeting.  No, it was me.  I didn't understand this at all.  I never spoke to strangers.  One thing this freshman year did for me was help me be even more extroverted and outgoing.  For a long time after coming back to CT I would strike up conversations with EVERYBODY much to the puzzlement of whoever was with me.

Valpo was a "dry" campus which meant all the fraternity houses were "off campus" on Mound St.  The phrase, "Going down Mound" meant going to whatever frat house was having a party and drinking free beer, dancing, and maybe someday MEETING OUR HUSBAND.  OK just kidding about that last part, nobody's declaring an MRS. major their freshman year (except my roommate, who told me flat out that's why she was there, which shocked me). 

Every Friday night a bunch of us girls would start to get ready to go out "down Mound" and would play some music to get us fired up and ready for fun.  There were several songs employed for this purpose.

Dancing With Myself was a big one.  We'd dance in and out of the bathroom, up the hall and scream together after Billy's yowling "Sweat sweat SWEAT SWEAT SWEEEAAAT!".  We would also have very loud sing-alongs to Paradise By The Dashboard Lights, by Meat Loaf.  I could have picked these songs, or a few others for this post, but I picked "Nasty Girl" because it was the constant.  We innocent German/Scandinavian Lutheran girls - many of us still virgins - would sing this song about hookers (or at least we thought it was about hookers!) with GUSTO.  I find that sweetly ironic today.

Even better is a song on the second side of the cassette - "If A Girl Answers"...

That's Prince as Jimmy's new girlfriend, "That's because he was swallowing vitamin E, now he's swallowing me!"  We ALL knew this song by heart, and would run around rap-singing this one too, constantly. 

I still think of those girls on Kreinheder One South - the ones who were so friendly when they met me, who took me to their homes on the weekends and did silly things with me.  Especially Scuba, who helped me paper Kristin and Kirsten into their room with newspaper and duct tape while we were supposed to be studying for midterms.  Scuba also stole a shopping cart with me and pushed me down the road where all the professors lived. 

Scuba and I stole a sawhorse and snuck it into our dorm

One time, a few of us went into Chicago including our friend Jeff (who was my East Coast Buddy from MA) and we broke into Soldier Field setting off an alarm, causing us to run like lunatics and hide in the Field Museum of Natural History until we felt safe enough to leave, laughing hysterically the whole time.

My year at Valparaiso was one of the hardest years in my life.  I was pining for a guy back home who was moving on, I was drinking far more than anybody else around me, I was gaining weight hand over fist because of the drinking and late night pizzas.  My grades were plummeting. I had gotten very drunk at a party and someone who I thought was a friend forced himself on me (now they call that date-rape...back then unless someone jumped out at you in a ski mask with a knife, it was YOUR FAULT if something like this happened, because you were drunk, stupid or "leading him on". Yeah.  I know.) and I didn't know what to do with that except take the party line and blame myself. I was blackballed from a fraternity for spilling a glass of Jack Daniels on myself and then wiping my hands on the back of a brother's white button down shirt.  I was cut from the only sorority I wanted to join during Rush.  I stopped going to class, started smoking crappy Illinois-grown pot and sneaking Jack Daniels in 2 liter bottles of Pepsi.  I sat in the TV lounge in thermal long johns (the only pants I had left that still fit me) and would watch almost 4 hours straight of soap operas.  I had realized that I had no idea who I was or what I wanted, that I was there because my parents wanted me to be there, and I didn't really belong.  I was on the wrong path, and didn't even know what the right path was supposed to be, I felt trapped. I lost all my Faith in God or anything good.  I changed roommates thinking that would help, since my roommate had no problem showing her disdain for my lifestyle choices.  I considered suicide. 

Finally, I called my mother and tearfully told her I needed to drop out.  At first she said no way, but she must have heard desperate insanity in my intense sobbing and she agreed to come get me.  Three weeks before finals, I packed her car with whatever stuff I hadn't sold or given away and rode all the way back to CT on top of my things while she and my grandfather took turns glaring at me in the rear view mirror for 26 hours.  To drop out of college was the ultimate failure.  I came from a family of educators, education was one of the most cherished values, and here I was, throwing my whole life away at age almost-19.  Now what would I do?

I didn't know. I did know, however, that it wasn't the school's fault.  There was something really wrong with ME. 

"Nasty Girl" reminds me of the fun I had, the girls who made me laugh, and of course, the me I was before I was challenged, and crumpled before the challenge. 

PJ Harvey - "Rid of Me"

When I turned 25 I was struck with the powerful realization that if I didn't leave Danbury, CT I was going to marry another fat alcoholic and we were going to have fat alcoholic kids who hated us.  I would drudge along doing what I was told and secretly rebelling in my heart until I had a heart attack or cirrhosis of the liver.

My car had died and I was bumming rides from a lovely coworker kind enough to drive my sorry ass to work.  I threw my four functioning brain cells together and figured that if I lived in New York City, I wouldn't need to drive, I could probably get gigs and maybe, oh, become famous or something ridiculously arrogant like that.

I knew someone who knew someone who was living in an all women's residence, kind of like a dorm, on Gramercy Park.  It was pretty cheap, rent included breakfast and dinner, was in a great neighborhood and foolishly, they accepted my application.  I had a place to live.  I was working in direct mail marketing and NYC is the Mecca of the industry, so finding a job wasn't difficult.  I was good to go.

So almost two months to day after I turned 25, I moved to New York City, not knowing anyone, really, not knowing my way around, and with very little material possessions.

One thing I did have was a CD-player/boom-box kind of thing.  One of the first places I wandered was St. Marks Place which led me to the record store, Sounds.

Giddy with excitement and the possibility of recreating myself, I decided to discover something NEW for me.  I'd been listening to a lot of alternative rock for a while, thrown in with some R&B and dance music and of course, the stand by classic rock that is ever present in Danbury, CT.

I had never heard of Polly Jean Harvey, and I saw this CD cover and bought it without even hearing it.  Sounds doesn't have listening stations:

Oh my God.

I was an instant fan.  She was angry and tiny and loud and played her own guitar and I wanted to be like her.

This CD was on heavy rotation for the majority of that summer and fall.  Whenever this song pops up on my iPod, it's so quiet in the beginning I usually think my iPod has accidentally shut off, and then I start to hear that high falsetto "lick my legs, I'm on fire" and I then I smile and turn it up.

This song reminds me of walking around New York and getting confused because I just left W. 4th Street, how did I end up turning on 10th Street? I remember smuggling bourbon into my room at the Parkside Evangeline Residence for Young Business Women - which was strictly verboten, but I thought I was slick enough to get away with it.  I think of my first friends in New York, other "inmates" of The Convent, as we liked to call it.  I think of how I would walk to work, hustling my ass off to get there on time and hating my co-worker Eyeore who tattled on me all of the time for my personal calls and ate lots of stinky fish at her desk.  I think of the first time my ass was grabbed on the subway, the first time I had street meat, and the first time I hugged myself with insane glee, knowing that I was finally in New York City and now maybe my "real life" could begin.

More than anything, "Rid Of Me" reminds me of my strong desire to be a musician, and how I had almost the same amount of fear.  Sometimes I would audaciously audition for a band, or even at Don't Tell Mama up in the Theater District, where I did a vampy strip tease to "You're Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile" I was wearing a suit jacket and skirt and looked kind of like a mini-van Mom before shimmying and shucking it down to a very tight white tank top with a giant smile painted across my large boobs.  The gays loved me.  I was asked to come back in a few weeks, but I didn't, because the fear kicked back in.  I have something I call "Reverse Stage Fright".  I have the nads to get up and read poetry or sing my songs, some of them very emotionally bare...and when I sit down, at the end of my spot, I shake like a leaf, waiting for punishment for putting the truth out there. 

P.J. Harvey is so raw on the album, I aspired to be as honest and as open about my passion and pain.  One of my deep regrets is having the ambition and a touch of audacity to start to go for my dreams, but not enough audacity or self-confidence to keep going.  At least I didn't have it at 25.  At 25, I was still not exactly sure who I was or what I really wanted.  At 25, I was starting over after already feeling like I had lived a lifetime of failure.  At 25 I was sitting in my little room on Gramercy Park, blowing pot smoke out the window and staring down on Irving Place, scouring the Village Voice for auditions and bands looking for singers and attempting to write my own music on my beat up, mis-strung Giannini guitar.  "Rid of Me" puts that ancient crap guitar back in my hands, and the pavement under my feet - I had no idea what was going to happen to me, I just know that I wanted SOMETHING to happen.

The Beatles - "Eleanor Rigby" - And Other Early Musical Influences

For my 4th birthday, I was given a orange and white plastic portable record player.  When the lid was down it looked kind of like a modern plastic suitcase. I loved it.  With the record player, I was given some Disney albums and some of my mother's old 45's.  My mother also bought me the 45 for "Yellow Submarine" because she thought it would be a good kid's song.

Little did she know that I preferred the B-side, which happened to be "Eleanor Rigby." 

Lutherans don't believe in reincarnation, but I don't know else how to explain my instant connection to the lonely people in this song.  I also think I wanted to know the answer to "Where do they all belong?" because I already knew I wasn't exactly right.

Don't get me wrong, I was definitely young, and my second favorite song was from Dumbo.

So I wasn't exactly a pre-gothic/emo type at age 4.  Eleanor Rigby spoke to me, Yellow Submarine did not.  Did that make me a screwed up four year old? Maybe.

My mother gave me a lot of her 45's.  My parents were squares.  My parents like show tunes and some modern music, but neither of them had their fingers on the pulse of what was hip.  I grew up listening to Broadway, Disney, pop songs from the 50's, doo wop, Simon and Garfunkel, Chicago and the Beach Boys.  Later, after my parents were divorced, my Dad had other music that he played in the car - the Muppet Show soundtrack, Queen, Supertramp, more show tunes.  I didn't really start exploring the radio or music on my own until I was about 10 or 11.

So some of the songs below were big favorites from ages 4-10.  I wish I could find all of them, some of them were hilarious B-sides to big sappy songs.  My Mom was a big Perry Como fan.

"Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" was a song my Dad would often play on the piano, and I would sing along with him.

Ooh! The Aristocats! One of my all time favorite Disney movies, I loved this Soundtrack, very jazzy/swing.  They never re-release this one! I wonder why? Oh yeah...watch the video:

"Spinning Wheel" was another big song on the Dad's Piano Hit Parade:

Ah, old awesome Chicago before Peter Setera took over and wussified it.

One of my all time favorites from Paul and Art.  In fact, my Dad once improvised while playing the organ at church and played the melody of "Sound of Silence" on the bass pedals while playing the old Lent hymn "There Is A Green Hill Far Away" on the upper keys, and the story goes I gasped and turned around and started excitedly telling my mother about what he was doing, because at age 4 or 5, I recognized the bass line immediately. 

You know, watching these videos, I'm struck by the racist stereotypes in both Dumbo and The Aristocats...I wonder if that's why they haven't been re-released in a million years? Wow.