1980s – A Roaring Good Yarn

The A Side

January 19, 2023May 25, 2023 Sue

“What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason.”
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses: Poems

This year marks a milestone birthday for me. I suppose every year is a marker of some kind, first marking our starting point and then where we are now. This new marker has me feeling particularly nostalgic and I’m not sure that would be the case had the events of the past few years gone differently and made me less introspective. In any case, I have a story about nostalgia and it begins with music, yet again.

One Saturday in November my husband and I decided to visit a vintage holiday marketplace. We were there mostly for the retro atmosphere, to get into the festive spirit, and perhaps find some one-of-a-kind gifts. Most of the vendors were selling new and used Christmas decor, and we enjoyed ourselves for an hour or so, laughing over the many antique decorations we recalled seeing in our childhood homes and other people’s harvest gold or avocado green living rooms in the seventies. There was a lot of “do you remember this?” And “my grandma had one just like that!” Items we might have considered tacky as children were now whimsically magical and worthy of a second look. So on we went, browsing here and there, and sometimes gasping in unison at the elevated prices of those same tacky knickknacks. Eventually we grew tired and were heading for the exit door when a small booth caught my eye. It immediately drew me in like a magnet because it was filled with cardboard boxes of used records. That was it, nothing else, and not one sparkly holiday decoration in sight. Just a few portable tables lined with open boxes of vinyl. I flipped through one stack and the first album I happened to pull out for a closer look was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

I held it in both hands and read all the song titles, probably with a sappy grin on my face. I have fond memories of that album. I heard it for the first time in an all-girls, junior high school gym class by way of a young and therefore cool female teacher, who played “Don’t Stop” on a portable record player at the start of every class, while we performed warm up exercises to it before heading outside for the long distance run we all dreaded. Even now, hearing that uplifting song makes me think about sideways stretches, jumping jacks, and high kicks in terry cloth gym shorts. Some administrator with a mean streak decided in the second semester to make us fourteen year old girls share gym time with grade twelve boys. They quickly took to stretching with us to Fleetwood Mac and only because our young teacher was attractive. Awkwardness ensued, mostly for the already awkward girls like me, who had no idea where to look and suddenly forgot the sequence of every move. One day the guys had a substitute teacher show up for their class. I heard all about Mr. Hot Teacher ahead of leaving the change room. The second I did, I spotted him and then excitedly called out his first name as I ran across the gym to envelope him in a fierce hug. He was my big brother’s best friend, ten years older than me, who’d first started hanging around our house when I was still in diapers. I didn’t stop to think how it must look to everyone gaping at us. Then I made it worse by loudly announcing in the echoing gym how much I missed him coming over to the house. Let’s just say there were whispers, raised eyebrows, and sidelong glances directed at me during that particular warm up. My brother’s friend and I laughed about it when we saw each other again several years later. Vivid memories like these prove that music is the soundtrack of life. At that time, a magical kind of marker made of shiny vinyl.

Strangely, I considered buying the record while standing in the marketplace booth. It was only five dollars for a bit of nostalgia that made me smile. I couldn’t remember the last time I looked at an LP, much less bought one. Yet there I was still gripping it with both hands, reluctant to let it go. The vendor was a woman about my age and for a moment we warmly reminisced about our favourite rock bands. She told me that she’d hung onto her teenage albums for many years. Then one sad day, she was involved in a highway motor vehicle accident in the Fraser Canyon while in the middle of moving house. Her box of records flew out of the back of her truck on impact and tumbled a long way down to the river at the bottom of a steep, rocky hillside. Lost forever. She said she was physically fine after the accident, but was sure her heart had broken a little that day, just like her records. Over the years since then, she’d rebuilt an even larger vinyl collection, but had far too many now and felt it was time to let some go. My husband was patiently waiting for me, so I tucked Rumours back inside the box, telling her I didn’t have a turntable. She told me that was easily fixable. Is it? I wondered. Then I thanked her for her time and carried on, thinking it might be kind of fun to have a turntable again. Silly, though. Why would I bother when I already had the ability to listen to Fleetwood Mac anytime I felt like it? What was the point of going back in time? Why add unnecessary clutter to a home already filled with too much stuff? So that was that. End of story. Until it wasn’t.

A few weeks later, I was scrolling through online Black Friday deals when I came across a suitcase-style, portable turntable that was similar to the one I used to tote around with me when I was a kid. Only this new modern one was nicer and a much better colour than the plain, two-toned brown one that my parents gave to me one long ago Christmas morning. It was also on sale and a reasonable price by today’s standards for something frivolous. So I purchased it on a whim, then proceeded to forget about it over the days to come while busy gift buying for family and friends. It wasn’t until early December that I received a shipping notification for the purchase. I was surprised how quickly I’d forgotten about it, and then found myself daydreaming about setting up the turntable over the holidays to listen to the small collection of combined records that my husband and I had stored away…somewhere. I told him I remembered seeing them not that long ago, and he laughed at me because he said it had been years since we last saw them. Besides, he was pretty sure we’d sold them at a garage sale or donated them, he couldn’t remember which. I felt like an idiot and my embarrassment must have shown on my face because he made a valiant effort to go searching for what he knew had to be long gone. He wasn’t trying to prove a point. He was hoping that he was wrong about it. That maybe the years had blurred both our memories and somewhere a box was buried like a forgotten time capsule. No such luck. They were gone and I felt unreasonably sad about it. I was being silly again, no doubt about it. Clearly those records had meant little to me or they’d still be hanging around, just like the dusty, treasured books I’ve hung onto for years because I still can’t part with any of them.

So now I had a turntable on its way and nothing to play on it. I kept thinking about the Fleetwood Mac one I’d recently let slip through my fingers. My husband reminded me I could buy records in secondhand shops and even new albums, if I really wanted them. Problem was, I wanted my old ones back. I wanted to remember what I’d once decided to keep, even after there wasn’t a use for them anymore. The special ones. The soundtrack of my youth. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t visualize the albums that were missing. Soon I realized this wasn’t about the lost records. It was about time moving too quickly to fully comprehend its swift passage. If I could forget about not holding onto those records, what else might I forget in the years to come? I thought about the woman who’d rebuilt her teenage album collection after everything had gone tumbling down a hillside. I didn’t want to rebuild my old collection. I didn’t even really want a new collection. What I was searching for was the girl who used to somehow balance a thick stack of albums under one arm, while also firmly clutching the handle of a suitcase turntable. Somewhere in time, she’s skipping her way to her best friend’s house to share the A side of a new record because every vinyl collector knows the A side has the best and most memorable songs.

As for the new turntable? It got lost in the mail over the Christmas delivery rush. Then it got rerouted and I forgot about it all over again. Miraculously, it showed up on my doorstep on New Year’s Day, of all days. A gift from past me to present me. And a reminder that everything important reveals itself again at exactly the right time.

Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac (Official Music Video) Hope the song makes you smile!

life

Background Music IV

February 22, 2022May 25, 2023 Sue

You Make Loving Fun: a mid-80s meet-cute

I never did believe in miracles
But I’ve a feeling it’s time to try ~ Fleetwood Mac

How often have we all heard that good things happen when we least expect them? Nobody mentions what can happen when we make a last minute decision to take a left turn instead of a right.

I’d already made up my mind by twenty-three that I was happiest when I wasn’t dating anyone. I decided I was done with the complications. No more trying to read the wrong guy’s mind or worrying about his hurt feelings. By then I’d grown accustomed to life on my own. Besides, it no longer felt awkward eating alone at restaurants with only my thoughts or a book for company. Sometimes I even preferred it that way. In my mind that was progress.

My older siblings cracked jokes about me already being jaded about love. An optimistic married friend stuck a magnet to my fridge of a cartoon frog wearing a crown with the caption you gotta kiss a lot of toads to find your prince. A single friend slipped under that magnet a “Purple Rain” photo of Prince on his motorcycle, just to be funny. Another friend taped a magazine photo of Charles and Diana to the fridge with a black felt pen X over Charles and Prince Toad!! scribbled under him. It was the middle of the eighties. By then even Bryan Adams had read between the lines of what was really going on with Chuck and Di in his heartfelt plea to “Diana”. I left all of those funny things on the fridge to remember I had people in my life who knew how to make me laugh at myself. It really is the greatest gift.

I was still working at the hideous secretarial job I talked about in my previous Background Music post, but circumstances had gotten marginally better because I’d earned a good promotion. Eventually someone else my age was hired to take my old job and the office manager’s verbal abuse that seemed to go along with it. I felt sorry for the new girl, so I got more emotionally involved in her workday problems then I probably should have. I didn’t really like her much. She tended to find the tiniest fault in anything good. In other words, she was a downer. I didn’t know her outside of work and that was fine by me because I already had a great group of friends. For the rest of this story we’ll call that long ago co-worker Sheila–not her real name but close enough.

One Friday evening, Sheila called me at home to ask me if I’d go out to dinner with her because she’d had a terrible day and could use a friend. I declined at first because I didn’t want to get involved in more office politics, especially outside of work and at the start of a weekend. But she tempted me with fish and chips at my favourite hole in the wall spot at the beach that she’d probably heard me mention once in the lunch room. She even offered to drive us there. It was her treat, she insisted, and it sounded so much better than anything I’d intended to reheat for dinner or watch alone on TV. We took a long walk on the beach afterwards because it was an unusually warm evening for so early in Spring. She talked non-stop about work problems and I kept walking ahead of her on the sand, looking to escape the drama. This was the moment I took that sharp left turn, against my better judgement. I blame it on the music.

We later walked up from the beach and found ourselves outside of a beachside neighbourhood pub that was blasting really good rock hits through the open doors of a patio onto the sidewalk in front. It wasn’t a nightclub and it looked a little rough around the edges. I hesitated when Sheila suggested we go in to get a drink and listen to the music for awhile. I didn’t have to work the next morning, but I knew she did, which meant that since she was driving we wouldn’t be staying long. So I finally agreed to just one drink. It didn’t look like the kind of place that had a dress code, which was a good thing because I was, to the best of my knowledge, wearing my favourite casual clothes that I always wore back then: old faded Levi’s and flat-soled, pointy-toed faux suede ankle boots that were called Peter Pan Getaway Boots. I wore those comfortable boots well past their fashion expiry date until one day they just fell apart.

“No dancing,” I warned Sheila. Not even if INXS came on. I adored Michael Hutchence then and “What You Need”, so that was going to be hard for me to resist. “And no flirting with guys,” I said to her and to myself, no matter how good-looking. One drink and then home. Deal? Deal. That was our agreement on the sidewalk before going inside. I should’ve known when Sheila paused to comb her wind-blown hair and put on cherry lipgloss that she fully intended to break the deal.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t busy for a Friday night. We easily found a table squeezed between a row of pool tables and the small, mostly empty dance floor. We ordered our drinks and put in a couple of requests with the DJ. I don’t think we’d even received our drink order before a guy with a pool cue made a beeline our way. Sheila immediately recognized him from back in her high school days and told me with a dramatic roll of her eyes not to invite him to sit down because he used to have a crush on her and she couldn’t stand him. Before I could tell her not to worry about it, he’d already pulled out a chair and sat down with us. My first impression was that he couldn’t read social cues because Sheila acted so cold towards him she nearly refroze the ice cubes in our drinks when they finally showed up.

They reminisced a little about school while I sipped my Screwdriver and thought about how this guy was a study in contradictions. He was wearing a stylish blue polo shirt that perfectly matched his bright blue eyes, and black slacks that looked like they’d been ironed professionally with sharp creases front and centre down the legs. I found out later that he couldn’t have cared less about clothes, so he’d walk into Bootlegger and ask any salesclerk on hand to make wardrobe decisions for him. He was a year older than me and an only child who still lived at home. His mom ironed his clothes. Red flags? I thought so, at first.

He also had the whitest teeth I’d seen outside of a toothpaste ad. He kept sliding that dazzling smile from Sheila to me. Back and forth it went. I couldn’t decide if he was cocky or confident. Both, maybe? The rest of his face was buried in hair. He resembled a younger, dark-haired version of Grizzly Adams. (A seventies TV character. Photo reference here.) His hair was too long and shaggy and he had a very thick, untrimmed beard. I really disliked scruffy beards, and still do. I’ve mentioned before that I tended to prefer messy guys over the more preppy ones, but this one looked like he’d been lost in the mountains for weeks and had stolen somebody else’s clothes on his way out of the woods.

Eventually he wandered back to take his next shot at the pool table behind us. The second he was out of earshot Sheila hissed at me not to make him so warmly welcome if he came back. I reminded her that I hadn’t spoken one word to him and the wildebeest was definitely her problem, not mine. In the middle of her next eye roll, Sheila the traitor accepted an invitation to dance from some other guy she seemed to already know too. I realized all of a sudden that this was Sheila’s usual Friday night hangout and I wasn’t going to get home anytime soon. Mad at her and at myself for getting played, I left the table in a huff and went looking for the restroom.

When I returned Sheila was still the dancing queen of the bar and Grizzly Adams was back sitting at our table. I was about to grab my jacket off the back of a chair to move on when he introduced himself and asked if he could buy me another drink. I told him no thanks and that Sheila wasn’t interested in him so maybe he should get back to playing pool with his buddies. He admitted that he didn’t like Sheila and never had because she had a bad attitude and thought she was better than everyone else. So true! He added that he’d noticed me the moment I walked by the pool tables and I was the reason he’d come over in the first place. Taken aback by his bluntness, I had to fight a smile as I impulsively pulled out a chair to sit with him while waiting for Sheila to run out of dance partners.

I can’t remember what we talked about that night. I remember laughing a lot. I thought he was funny, but also kind of full of himself and not at all my type. He asked me to dance and I agreed to just one, probably the INXS song I’d already requested. His wild dance moves needed some fine tuning. He was also too direct and tended to share every random thought that popped into his head. He was an open book and I hadn’t read one of those in a long time. It was pretty obvious right from the start that we were polar opposites. Yet there was something really likeable about him. He asked for my phone number and in a moment of weakness I gave it to him. I warned him as I handed him the cocktail napkin I’d written it on that I wasn’t interested in being anything more than friends. He agreed with a grin and some smart-ass comment that I think was supposed to be flirtatious, but fell so flat it thunked. I finally left with Sheila, hoping he’d lose my number.

I hardly gave him another thought until he phoned me the next afternoon. Somehow, by some miracle, we fell back into the comfortable rhythm of talking about nothing and laughing about everything for a really long time. Not surprising, we still have differing opinions about what happened from there. I think we made vague plans to do something together the following weekend. He says we went out that same night. Potato, potatoh. All I know is that I must’ve felt comfortable enough to let him pick me up at my apartment. I never did that on a first date, but then this wasn’t a date.

Someone else showed up at my apartment door for that first non-date. A complete stranger. A short-haired, freshly shaved good-looking stranger who smelled nice and offered me a bouquet of pink carnations as I glanced over his shoulder down the hallway to the second-floor elevator. Who was this dreamboat and where was the Grizzly Adams I’d just intercom buzzed into the building? Laughing, he assured me they were one and the same, and then jokingly offered to go back down to the lobby to start all over again. I noticed the familiar blue eyes first and then the teeth, and I had to catch my breath for a second. Apparently the bushman’s hair had gone down the drain right after I told him I don’t date guys with beards. I still maintain I wouldn’t have said that to someone I’d just met. He says I was pretty clear about it when I gave him my phone number.

We quickly went from not dating to seeing each other as often as possible. He claims he knew I was The One the moment he was about to take a shot at the pool table and saw me stroll by in my quote “painted on” jeans. I think I knew it when he stopped showing up with flowers and started bringing bags of groceries to fill my bare cupboards and empty fridge. One day he tossed out my you gotta kiss a lot of toads to find your prince fridge magnet while bluntly informing me he was the only toad I’d ever need. To this day he still signs most cards to me with Love, Toad.

He mostly liked country music and I never stopped loving rock bands. We couldn’t even agree on a future wedding song for our first dance. He liked Kenny Rogers and I preferred Led Zeppelin. My favourite LZ song has always been “Going to California”, which isn’t exactly first dance material. We finally agreed to have two songs. My pick was “Sea Of Love”, Robert Plant’s version from his short-lived Honeydrippers days. We’d met at the beach, after all, and it was about as Zeppelin as I was going to get at the wedding. He picked Kenny Rogers’ “You Decorated My Life”. When I think back to those early days, though, the background music in my mind begins with Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” from Karate Kid 2 because it was on a mix tape of movie soundtracks we always brought along with us on summer road trips. It ends with “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, which reminds me of our many camping holidays and Richard Gere looking fine in uniform.

Slowly he started bringing more of his things to my place and leaving them there until one day he just never left. Not long after, we got engaged and then we bought a house together. Did we agree on everything? Rarely. He liked playing baseball and the great outdoors–fishing, camping, and off-road four wheeling in his truck. I mostly liked going to the movies or staying in, curled up with a stack of library books. I’m a homebody and he still drags me outdoors every chance he gets and never minds if I bring a book or my knitting. I stopped inviting him to movie theatres a long time ago because he can’t stay awake and snores too loud. My dad once joked, “the boy could fall asleep on a clothesline if he had to.” My mom decided he must have a clear conscience.

Almost thirty-four years later, we still agree that our wedding was the best one we’ve ever attended. We had so much fun at the reception that we didn’t want to leave. Finally some of our tired guests formed a long human chain and kind of just swept us out the door. We honeymooned in Hawaii for two wonderful weeks and we might not have left there either, if we hadn’t run out of money first. Newlywed life moved quickly. Our first baby arrived the following year. Two years later, we welcomed our second child. I watched those early years go by in a blur on the highest fast forward setting possible.

Now all of us, our grown children and their spouses, still get fish and chips at that same favourite hole in the wall spot at the beach. Sometimes I wonder where my life would be if I hadn’t taken that long beach walk. What if I’d said hell no instead of yes please to stepping off the sidewalk to follow the music inside? I’ve made some wrong turns along the way, but on that night I chose the right left turn.

Stay tuned for more Background Music and a little about life in the 90s. Rock on and thanks for tuning in.

Feel like following the music with me? Below are the Youtube links to the artists and music mentioned or thought about during the writing of this blog.

You Make Loving Fun – Fleetwood Mac

Purple Rain – Prince and The Revolution

Diana – Bryan Adams

What You Need – INXS (pronounced “in excess” in case you don’t know) I always want to get up and dance when I hear this song!

Need You Tonight – INXS Big love for all the 80s vibes in this video.

Never Tear Us Apart – INXS Reminds me again that Michael Hutchence was another bright light and talented songwriter who burned out far too soon. RIP 1960-1997

New Sensation – INXS (Live version)

Going to California – Led Zeppelin (Fav. live recording/video) The guitar, mandolin, and vocals still give me goosebumps.

Sea of Love – Robert Plant and The Honeydrippers version. (Great song! Strange video.)

You Decorated My Life – Kenny Rogers

Glory of Love – Peter Cetera

Up Where We Belong – Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes

Alone – Heart

Stairway to Heaven – The 2012 tribute to Led Zeppelin by Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson with the late LZ drummer John Bonham’s son on drums. I Included this more recent special performance because it’s amazing. Jimmy Page’s joy and Robert Plant’s tears are everything. I’ve only just figured out that many of the musicians I have listened to the most over the years seem to be emotionally connected to each other too.

music

Background Music III

October 26, 2021May 25, 2023 Sue

More life lessons in the 80s.

“Shout, shout, let it all out. These are the things I can do without.”

~ Tears For Fears “Shout”

Living alone for the first time in my life was not the exciting adventure I hoped it would be. As mentioned in my previous blog post Background Music II: Forever Young, my mature parents retired from their jobs and moved far away when I was in my early twenties. It’s then that I started living pay cheque to pay cheque in a small, sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment, paying rent and bills and a monthly bank loan on a newer, more reliable car. “Why does it always feel like there’s more month than money?” I made that joke often, but a joke is never really funny when it’s the hard truth of things.

I liked my own company, loved nothing more than a solitary afternoon of reading or tapping my story ideas onto the worn keys of my electric typewriter named Dylan. But this felt very different because I was alone and lonely at the same time. All of my closest friends were married, except for one who was still casually dating like I was. Before the ink was even dry on the apartment lease, she up and moved away for a new boyfriend and a new job. She was supposed to be my roommate and then suddenly she wasn’t in my life very much at all.

My mother checked in with me by way of long-distance phone calls once a week, which always began with four words: do you need money? I never stopped telling her I was doing just fine, even when I wasn’t. The truth of the matter? I didn’t want her to worry about me because I grew up seeing life kick her down more times than you would think humanly possible to get up from. She was my best friend and I wanted her to be happy. More than anyone she deserved retirement and to finally be free of nagging responsibilities like me, her youngest child. Of course I didn’t understand until I became a parent myself that worry doesn’t suddenly disappear in the middle of reassuring chats with grown children. I’m sure part of her respected my fierce independence because she raised me to be that way. However, it wasn’t unusual for me to find a fifty dollar bill (a small fortune then) tucked inside a drawer after one of her visits to stock my empty cupboards with groceries and fill my freezer with home cooked meals. She never could take no for an answer when it came to her kids.

Out of my five siblings, only one sister still lived in the same general vicinity as me. She was very busy with work and a young family, but she made every Sunday a standing invitation for me to come to dinner and to do my laundry at her house to spare me the cost (and the sketchiness) of the basement laundry room where I lived. I had another standing invitation most Thursday nights for dinner and “Must See TV” with a married couple I went to high school with. They had cable, I didn’t, and I also had a key to their place because I was their dog sitter. I remember telling them somewhat jokingly one evening while eating pasta and watching MTV that if Bryan Adams personally sang “Heaven” to me then I could die a happy woman. I think they took that amusing confession as their direct mission to ask all the suitable single men they knew to join us for dinner on Thursday nights. Young men who were nothing like the guys I tended to date because, according to my friends, that was only ever going to keep me on the road to loneliness and heartbreak. Why do married people always think they know what’s romantically best for their single friends? Some of the worst, most uncomfortable dinner dates I have ever endured only took place because I happened to mention Bryan Adams while slurping spaghetti.

Not that I had much spare time to enjoy living up the single life. I was too tired and too broke for it. My new full-time “good secretarial job” paid better than most jobs at the time, but it was a Monday to Friday (and even some Saturdays) fast-paced walk through living hell. Rinse and repeat eight hours a day. I worked in a very busy, very prominent medical practise for five male General Practitioners, whom I was not permitted to talk to (much less look at) unless they asked me a direct question first. This was not their office code of conduct. All five of them, ranging in age from almost retired to fresh out of medical school, were always pleasant and professional, and most of them worked so many long hours that it wasn’t unusual to find one of them sleep-standing against a wall in the brightly lit corridor of exam room doors.

This particular rule (and so many others) was laid out in actual writing by the clinic’s longtime office manager, a humourless and physically imposing fifty-something mother of eight, who never wore anything but formal dress suits (because slacks were très gauche) and thick pantyhose that made a distinctive swish-swish sound when she tried to sneak up to catch the office staff slacking. Which, of course, never happened because we were too busy typing our fingers to the bone and hurrying through whispered conversations, less we provoke the fiery wrath of the Dragon Lady inside her glass-walled office across from the main reception area. Trust me to come up with that moniker my first week on the job. Even the co-workers who’d been held prisoner under her reign of terror since before I was born began secretly referring to her as the Dragon Lady (or DL for short).

I was the newest and one of the youngest employees, and I was positive the DL hated me the most. The feeling was mutual and up until then I hadn’t ever found a reason to hate anyone. Once she called me Irma La Douce when she came upon me leaning tiredly outside an exam room door waiting to get a doctor’s signature on an important document before I could go home. I snapped to attention, even though I couldn’t tell by her normally snide expression if it was an insult or not. It seemed nobody else knew either or if they did they weren’t telling. Of course there was no Internet to reference, so I later called to ask my mother. Turned out Irma La Douce was a French prostitute played by Shirley MacLaine in a comedy of the same name that was coincidentally, according now to Google, filmed around the same time I was born. How delightful to be compared to a funny hooker by your supervisor, which was actually one of her milder insults.

I told my mom every harrowing detail of the DL’s verbal abuse during that phone conversation. She listened for a long time, first responding with a string of expletives and ending with a detailed account of what she’d do if she had five minutes alone in a room with that you-know-what. Then she told me something I hadn’t really understood until that moment: not everyone I met was going to like me. Rise above it. Don’t ever let someone like that see you crumble because they tend to thrive on weakness. And when things got too hard, Mom advised me to do what she’d been telling me to do ever since I was a child—find the nearest outdoor open space (preferably far from the family home) and yell my frustrations straight into the wind. As strangely freeing as yelling into the wind is for a kid, a young woman screaming anywhere publicly tends to get the police involved. So shouting the words along with Tears For Fears’ “Shout” in my car during the drive home from work became my fight song. Even hearing it today stirs my inner prize fighter.

There was no human resources department back then. Even if one did exist, no doubt the DL would in charge of that too and it would just be her word against mine. I won my very first round with her by making a fashion statement. Office staff were permitted only to wear white medical dress uniforms, even though none of us were nurses. The doctors had a team of nurses who efficiently assisted them in the exam rooms at the far back end of the clinic. My job was to take care of the mounds of paperwork, billing, and the scheduling of both clinic appointments and hospital surgeries. The front reception desk was the first point of entry for patients and because we were wearing uniforms we were always mistaken for nurses. If I got through a day without fighting nausea after being forced to take a closer look at someone’s enormous boil or bleeding open wound, then it was a blessed day indeed.

At the time long pencil skirts and white high neck Victorian-inspired blouses with romantic lace details and loose, billowy sleeves were in style. I managed to find a pristine white denim calf-length pencil skirt to pair with my new pretty blouse and dangling white shell earrings, and then I dared to wear the blindingly white ensemble to work one morning. I know I turned heads walking into the building—admiring glances for my cool sense of style, but mostly wide-eyed trepidation for the storm that was about to blow through the office. No sooner had I sat down at my desk, then I was summoned by speaker phone into the DL’s office. She was so livid that she forgot to ask me to close the door. I was told later that pretty much every person in the clinic, even patients in the waiting room, stopped what they were doing to listen to her (literally) dress me down. She finished off her raging rant by telling me the doctors were going to fire me on the spot once they saw my attire. My face burning with embarrassment, I somehow found the gumption to dig deep and calmly inform her that one of the doctors had just told me I look like Stevie Nicks and he didn’t seem mad about it. I kept my job, my style, and I learned how to lock and load my backbone that day.

My only escape from office politics was an hour-long lunch break that we all had to take at the same time while the doctors were off doing their hospital rounds. I began eating my sandwiches in my car at the furthest spot in the clinic’s parking lot the moment I discovered that the lunchroom was where the Dragon Lady continued to hold court like she was Marie Antoinette looking to cut off the head of any lowly serf who dared to interrupt her running commentary on world events and her brilliant children. Sometimes I read or went for walks. Sometimes I knitted a few rows on the sweater a co-worker paid me to make for her. Other times I listened to music and danced a little inside my head while staring at the cement wall of the building next door. Is there anything worse than being stuck in a job you hate because there’s no other immediate alternative? “Manic Monday” was my theme song because I was relieved to know I wasn’t the only one perpetually wishing it was Sunday. “Kissing Valentino by a crystal-blue, Italian stream” sounded pretty nice too.

This photo perfectly reflects my feelings about Tom Petty.
If I had to pick only one of his songs to listen to for the rest of my days it would be “Wildflowers“
Rest In Peace xo
*Photo from TomPetty.com*

Whenever I needed a hug more than I needed to shake a fist at the world, I’d pull out something a little stronger from my glove compartment for the drive home—my Tom Petty cassettes. I don’t know exactly what it is about Tom’s voice and music that makes my heaviest emotions feel about a thousand pounds lighter. All I know is that Tom Petty is still my favourite balm for the blues. You don’t have to know someone personally to mourn their death. The songwriter in him sure seemed to know me and my heart broke a little the moment I heard he died. Many times his soothing lyrics have saved me from making rash decisions in the heat of the moment, like a pep talk with an old trusted friend over several cups of coffee.

One warm Spring evening at the end of a hard work week, I was sitting in backed up traffic at a red light with the car windows rolled down, thinking about plans for the weekend and seat-dancing along to Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ cheeky “Here Comes My Girl“. I know it was that song because ever since high school I used to play it, rewind and replay it, repeatedly telling “the whole wide world to shove it” right along with him. Distracted, I took a quick glance to my right at the car next to me and then did a double-take. I’m not sure if things happen the same way for everyone, but for me, more often than not, the universe likes to cast me a hi there, look what I’ve got for you now line whenever I feel like I’m sinking.

I hadn’t seen my first boyfriend since the day we broke up when we were nineteen. Now there he was four years later in the driver’s seat of his same car, looking exactly the same himself, with a stunned expression blinking back at me that wasn’t all that different from the one he had when I left him. I remember feeling a flash of uncontainable joy and then I started waving at him a little too enthusiastically, until the passenger to his right suddenly leaned forward to take a look at me. The passenger was me! Well, not me. A girl who looked very much like me. The senior high school version of me. It was unsettling, to say the least. I saw his mouth tighten as he dropped his arm out the open window to give me a small wave. Then traffic began moving and he was gone.

Once I recovered from the surprise of it, I had to laugh because, seriously, what were the odds? My amusement quickly spiralled into one of those stop-and-start fits of the giggles that lasted for a ridiculously long time. By the next morning I had overanalyzed the situation to the point of convincing myself there had to be a cosmic shift happening and I wished I had a crystal ball to figure it out. Don’t get me wrong, I suffered no residual teenage heartbreak over him, other than the usual nostalgic pangs of first love. We broke up after three years of going steady because we both agreed we were too young to get married and so much alike that even at nineteen we already seemed like an old married couple with not much left to learn about each other. While that might feel comfortable or comforting for some people, for me it felt stifling. Still, how could I not consider the what-ifs after that?

What if we were still together? What if we actually were married? Would I be happier than I am right now? Perhaps more settled? Or would there already be small cracks in our relationship, similar to the ones I was beginning to detect in some friends’ marriages? There was so much emotional unpacking going on with the help of Tom Petty that weekend, well, it was almost a relief to get back to work on Monday. Yes, Tom. “The Waiting” truly is the hardest part.

I had no clue then that this time was a significant milestone for me because I was learning how to keep my footing while taking a few solid punches along the way. Somewhere in the middle of all those what-ifs I developed a strong inkling that significant change was about to happen in my life. I worried about it too. I’ve always had a hard time dealing with change, even if it’s orchestrated by my own choices. Turned out I was right. Not long after that weekend’s existential crisis, I quite by accident met the guy I was going to one day marry. Problem was, I didn’t start off liking him much.

Stay tuned for more 80s stories, coming soon!

Below are the Youtube links to the songs or music videos mentioned (or thought about) during the writing of this post. If you only have time for a few, then make them Tom Petty’s recordings. You may visit the 70s and early 80s in my previous posts of Background Music.

Shout – Tears For Fears

Everybody Wants to Rule The World – Tears For Fears

Heaven – Bryan Adams

Manic Monday – The Bangles

Addicted To Love – Robert Palmer

Don’t Do Me Like That – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (My favourite Live version of a very young Tom Petty)

Here Comes My Girl – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

The Waiting – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

Refugee – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around – Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty

Later Tom Petty recordings that I’m including because I love them too.

Free Fallin’

I Won’t Back Down (Some familiar faces in this one)

Handle With Care – Tom Petty with the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys

Wildflowers (Home recording & video) This is the posthumous release of the home recorded and filmed version of the song—joyful for me to watch and at the same time profoundly bittersweet.

music

Background Music II

October 3, 2021May 25, 2023 Sue

The Early 80s : Forever Young

“Dearly Beloved, We are gathered here today, To get through this thing called Life.”

~ Prince “Let’s Go Crazy”

I mentioned in my previous post Background Music Part One that it was great fun to be a kid in the 1970s. To be in your late teens and early twenties at the start of the 80s, and to be in love with music and dancing, well, it was a whole other level of fun. It was totally rad! That window of time right after high school graduation is both exhilarating and frightening: What do I want to do with this thing called Life? I attended one school from grades eight to twelve where I gathered a very close network of friends and left with a small peer-voted scholarship for the many years I dedicated to writing articles for our school newspaper. It seemed most everyone but me was convinced I was going to be an investigative journalist, setting the world on fire (or at least our community) with truth, integrity, and flowery prose by way of my electric typewriter that I named “Dylan” in homage to both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas. Just recently I learned that Bob Dylan named himself after the poet. Now I’m wondering if perhaps I already knew that. No matter, I still carry deep feelings about their individual writings.

Big love for the two Dylans. Fun fact: my mom ran a leather goods shop during my youth and I think of her when I catch the scent of leather. Couldn’t resist a candle that smells like leather bound books.

My graduating class picked up diplomas and our freedom in the school gymnasium to the wistful “Time” by The Alan Parsons Project drifting in the background. While I struggled to figure out which college classes I should take to become an important writer, my mature parents were already at the age where they were talking about taking early retirement from their jobs. They were around the age I am now, which in my mind meant they were really old (longtime grandparents, for crying out loud!) and completely out of touch with what it meant to be young and idealistic. Never mind that on the brink of eighteen my dad enlisted in the RAF and headed off to years of war. This was all about me. So what if I was the last bird to leave the nest? I was eighteen and nowhere near ready to soar! Hell no, I didn’t want to make writing a nice hobby. I certainly did not want to find a “good secretarial job” in order to support myself, just so they could finally retire and leave for parts unknown. So I lived at home, worked a part-time job, and attended a local college full-time, while my parents begrudgingly stayed put and held on to their jobs for a couple more years.

Two of my high school girlfriends attended a different college that was a little further away from where we grew up. Together they decided to rent an apartment that was close to their campus. It was a dump, but a glorious dump because it signified freedom from parental interference. The building was ancient and three-stories high with about eighteen units in total. Their one-bedroom top-floor no-elevator apartment was fairly spacious and we turned it into the best damn hangout in the whole world. There was a narrow hallway from the front door to the main living area. The first thing we pinned to that dingy hallway wall was a floor to ceiling black and white poster of James Dean with his finger pointing in the direction of the living room because that’s where all the fun began. Here it is –and it’s how much now? One more thing we should have hung onto instead of just the memories. But, oh, those memories.

*Big hair, big dreams*. *I still love polka dots!*
Some snapshots from the early 80s taken with a poor quality camera of high quality fashion.
I see now that I inherited my love of houseplants from my parents. Suntanning on the hoods of cars while blasting music was “a thing” back then…but on a mountaintop parking lot Après Ski? Crazy girls!
(Yes, that’s me striking a pose on some dad’s poor old car)

MTV had just made its debut and for the first time we could actually see our favourite musicians instead of listening to them on the radio. There they were as if playing live in the living room, lip-syncing their lyrics, dancing provocatively, and acting out random movie-like scenes that often made little or no sense. Still. There they were! And there we were in that crummy apartment with MTV on in the background, dancing and singing and rightfully earning thumps on the walls from irritated neighbours. Saturday nights were for boyfriends or restaurant jobs, but Friday nights, at least in the beginning, were reserved for our highly sacred girls-only sleepovers. We’d show up to the apartment, anywhere from three to six of us, with bulging overnight totes, sleeping bags, and just enough pooled ingredients to make dinner and to inexpertly mix terrible drinks like Screwdrivers or the cheapest rum available to water down with ice and Coke. We thought we were so grown up and sophisticated. Ha!

We danced along to the Go-Go’s and sang our hearts out to Queen and Journey. Sometimes we’d make it a theme night and wear the clothing to best represent it. I remember two of those themes: come dressed as the first place you want to travel to when you have some money and your favourite song today. In the middle of winter I wore a flowered shirt, shorts and a plastic lei to the first party and to the latter a thrifted cat-print dress made out of faux fur and black pointy ears because “Stray Cat Strut” was my rockabilly jam that week.

Eventually things changed, as they always do. Some of the girls began making plans to marry their high school or college boyfriends, while a few more, like me, broke up with ours. The singles quickly grew bored seeing new stacks of wedding magazines every Friday night, so we’d leave the almost-newlyweds to walk several blocks to a college area night club. We just wanted to be young and dance the night away to really great music. I couldn’t imagine myself settling into marriage so soon because I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be. I’d seen my older siblings shoulder some pretty heavy responsibilities with wildly varying outcomes. The odds already seemed stacked against me, even while the expectation for most young women then was to figure it all out quickly and smartly. We grew up hearing we could have it all if we worked hard enough and made the right decisions. Problem was, my young adult life felt more like a multiple choice magazine quiz and the circled answer was always D: none of the above.

If I couldn’t afford to buy a drink I’d volunteer to drive us to the college night club in my first car that someone named the “Blue Bomb”. I think I was one of the first to have my own car. Most of the girls were still driving their parents’ vehicles. Mine was an early 1970s Datsun that I bought with graduation gift-money ($1,000 cash; it pays to have a large family) from a friend’s elderly neighbour, who was probably in her sixties. Everyone recognized that car for a few reasons: it was ugly, it was an electric shade of blue, and a bright yellow and black bumble bee stuffy hung on the rearview mirror, gifted to me by those same girlfriends who called me Sue Bee throughout high school to distinguish me from all the other Susans in our classes.

The highly visible Blue Bomb became a dilemma for us single girls. If we took it out then so-and-so (usually someone’s ex-boyfriend or annoying sibling) could easily spot it in the parking lot and come find us. I’d try to park my car as far away as walking in heels would allow. Inevitably we’d return to find a note stuck under a windshield wiper. Usually it was from other friends telling us which Denny’s to meet them for a one a.m. coffee or fries. One time there was a long, rambling (nobody recognized the handwriting) love letter to me from an anonymous writer that was stuffed inside a bouquet of pink carnations. I had no idea who left it on my car and, honestly, right then I couldn’t have cared less. However, my friends were convinced I had a stalker or maybe a romantic secret admirer, who knew me well enough to know I loved carnations. My argument was who doesn’t love them? Dying of curiosity, they hatched all sorts of ridiculous maneuvers called “operation flower boy” to flush him out of hiding. The plan only resulted in a bad case of road rash for one friend when she tripped while chasing down an innocent, and probably terrified, teenage boy out walking his dog, who made the mistake of stopping to tie his sneaker right next to my car.

The mystery was never solved and the ridiculousness ended there, thankfully. I didn’t receive another love letter or more pink carnations until I met my future husband, but that’s a story for later in the 80s. And no, he wasn’t the mysterious flower boy, although that would be the perfect meet-cute in a rom-com. Speaking of cute, while on our first date we discovered that we went to neighbouring high schools and moved in similar social circles. It’s even likely we were in the same local clubs at the same time. There weren’t many back then and they were always overcrowded with twenty-somethings. He was more likely shooting pool and causing trouble while I was trying to Moonwalk, which probably explains why we didn’t meet-cute off the dance floor until five years later.

When it wasn’t in the shop for repairs, the Blue Bomb kept motoring along, and was often spotted at local beaches, windows rolled down with the one and only Prince blasting, while we girls suntanned on the blazing hot hoods of our cars instead of more sensibly on beach towels in the sand like everyone else. At that moment in time I wasn’t interested in serious dating or anything that got in the way of weekend dance parties. I was like Cyndi Lauper in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, kicking up my heels in party dresses with big costume jewelry earrings. The original video for your viewing pleasure, in case you haven’t seen it. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album was also huge and guys started putting in a little more effort to woo the ladies by dressing up in oversized two-button pastel blazers with shoulder pads and baggy pleated trousers. As much as I liked to dress up, for some reason it was always the witty, untidy boys who first caught my eye. If my young life was an 80s John Hughes film, then it would co-star messy Judd Nelson instead of preppy Emilio Estevez with a soundtrack by Queen or Joan Jett because according to me and Billy Joel, “new phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways…It’s still rock and roll to me.“

A couple of years into the 80s, I’d finally saved enough money to take that longed for spring break vacation to Hawaii. It was everything I had hoped it would be and more. Aloha! The Hawaiian-themed dance parties were for real this time. I spent days walking on sunshine and nights dancing in the dark. I cut my long, layered hair to look like Olivia Newton-John in her “Physical” years, only minus the headband because I just wasn’t the sporty type. Upon my short-haired, suntanned return, my parents announced they were giving me six months to get my life in order so they could retire and move far away. That moment was the metaphorical needle scratching across the record for me. In their defence they’d already given me more than enough time to get on track and I can see how they thought I was wasting most of it. Still, it wasn’t the way I saw it then. I felt ambushed. My bank account was now down to single digits thanks to the vacation and there was barely enough time to build it back up. The Blue Bomb had to be traded for a newer, more reliable sedan with a hefty parental co-signed bank loan. I put college classes on an indefinite hiatus and I went in search of full-time work, which ended up being the dreaded “good secretarial job” that I hated with the same driving force that Aqua Net hairspray was to big hair.

I searched for weeks to find an apartment I could barely afford on my own while also having to make monthly car payments. I collected cast-off dishes and furniture from family members and newlywed friends, and for the first time in my life I was about to live alone. I wouldn’t admit, least of all to myself, that I was terrified about this big life change. Still, I was going to prove that I could make it on my own and I didn’t need anyone’s help doing it. Hand me an ultimatum and I’ll respond by digging in my heels wherever I land. I’ve always been too stubborn for my own good.

Hit the pause button for now–the late 80s years are coming soon!

Below are Youtube links to the songs or music videos mentioned (or thought about) during the writing of this post. Feeling groovy? Check out my previous post Background Music Part One: the 60s and 70s.

Let’s Go Crazy – Prince

Forever Young – Bob Dylan

Time – The Alan Parsons Project

Our Lips Are Sealed – The Go-Go’s (The best video for early 80s young women style!)

We Got The Beat – The Go-Go’s

Under Pressure – David Bowie & Queen

Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey

Tainted Love – Soft Cell

Stray Cat Strut – Stray Cats

Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant

Girls Just Want to Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper

Billie Jean – Michael Jackson