Going Gray

I’m giving it a try.

I found my first gray hair the year I went to grad school. I was 21, and I was horrified. I liked my chestnut locks, and I was in no way ready to color my hair, so I just pulled out the coarse gray interlopers as they showed themselves.

Fast forward a few years to the band days. As one, all of the Poptarts except Susan fell under the spell of henna. Henna seemed to have many things going for it. It—supposedly—was not permanent. The woman in the salon who sold us our first fix told us that if we didn’t like it, it would wash away in a few weeks, no problem. (I soon discovered this to be completely untrue.) It was also available in many bright shades of red. A nice statement for New Wave superstars at that time.

So we all went home and slathered on the mud pack, except for Susan. Some of us went redder than others. Gael went vivid red. Meegan used burgundy henna, which was deep and striking. Margie, with her nearly black hair, went for the eggplant color, which gave her spiky ‘do a purple cast. I went with plain old red at first, which gave me subtly auburn hair, except for the gray strands, which ended up glinting bright ginger, like tendrils of sunlight. I loved it! I loved that the henna was translucent, so that lighter hair really shone through.

And over the years, I’ve kept using henna, although as my streaks of gray beneath the henna got wider and more defined, I shifted from red to a mixture of red and burgundy, to straight burgundy, to a mixture of burgundy and brown—the brown to tone down the red in the burgundy so that I don’t look TOO much like mutton trying to dress as lamb, if you know what I mean…

And I’ve always gotten compliments on my hair color, because the highlights of henna on gray look so organic, even as the color itself does not… if that makes any sense. Heh.

But over the years, it’s gotten harder to cover the gray. I have to henna more and more often, and I have to leave the henna on my hair for longer and longer for it to “stick.” Sometimes it does fade, although not completely. And if I DO get it to stick really well, I end up looking kind of skunky in no time. Well, if skunks had red fur.

And the process itself is simply ponderous. Messy. Time-consuming.

So I’ve decided to see what my hair REALLY looks like.

Now…this isn’t the first time I’ve toyed with idea of going gray just to see. In fact, the first time I broached the subject with anyone other than myself was on a walk home from Marnee Thai to the flat in the Haight more than 16 years ago. I asked Tom what he thought of the idea, and he said it was fine with him. Of course, unbeknownst to me, he was planning on dumping me the next day, so, yeah. It wasn’t as if he was planning on sticking around to witness the results of that experiment, was he? Hmmm? And I didn’t follow through… just kept henna-ing and henna-ing.

And it’s not all that easy to go from years of henna-ing to natural locks, believe me. It’s not as if I can go to a salon and ask them to strip the color because henna, as it turns out, bonds with hair rather than coating it. It is MORE permanent than commercial hair color from a box. Sigh. And I don’t want to shave my head and let it grow in as it will. I fear my skull is way too bumpy and lumpy for that to work! But if I’m going to do this, I need to take the plunge sometime, right?

But, why now?

Well, I really do NOT want to end up one of those old dames with the flaming red hair who isn’t fooling anyone. And I’ve seen many women with chic haircuts and gray hair and it looks lovely. From what I can tell as I start to go skunky, the gray I have (and I’m sure I’m at more than 50% at this point) is nice and silvery—not drab and mousey. I do want to see if I can pull off the gray look and not look way old. And the last time I hennaed was one of those times when it started to fade rather than skunk. So it looks as if I’m going gray (very quickly!) rather than letting my dye-job grow out. Jeff is cool with the idea, although he likes me as a redhead. Matches my fiery personality. Heh.

So I’m giving this gray hair thing a whirl.

If I don’t like it, there’s always Lady Clairol… Right?

August Is a Wicked Month

The seeds of the band's demise were sown quite early, all told. And, in hindsight, it's not hard to see the cracks as they developed. But it seemed like such a perfect story, and so much was happening so fast... it got away from us before we even realized it.

Never forget that this band started out as a lark. It was for fun. A chance to stave off the inevitability of growing up--at least in one part of our lives. It was a chance to be a part of something exciting--no matter that Syracuse was the buckle of the rustbelt, in the late seventies it had an amazingly robust music scene. And we got swept up in it like we were riding a tornado. Once we started getting label interest, we figured the rest was inevitable. Yeah... we were babes in the woods.

The thing is, once we started to see that we could maybe make a living off this--and be rich and famous (and new-wave superstars!)--it was not a hobby any longer. It was business. And there are aspects of the music business that don't exactly lend themselves to happy-go-lucky friends just having fun playing in a band.

Things like royalties. The people who make the most money in a band that does original material are the band members who write the songs. They get publishing rights and royalties. A band member who doesn't get a writing credit makes a lot less. A LOT less. And Meegan was our main songwriter, although Gael would often come up with a bridge for her songs. And our signature three-part harmonies? Most of those were my brainchildren. But without the writing credit, monetarily it was "so what?" It became clear that our best financial interests lay in writing songs. Now, I'm not much of a songwriter--we only performed one song of mine--but Gael stopped providing bridges and started writing songs of her own.

This effort became even more important once Meegan, who at first had been content to let Gael front the band, decided that she wanted to sing her own songs. If Gael wanted to sing lead on anything other than some of our first songs and the few covers we did, she would have to write those songs for herself. And then there was the tension over which songs we'd learn next, where they would go in the set, what we would have to drop to fit new songs... For a long time, we managed to handle that pretty well, I think. But a rivalry was growing, ever so slowly...

Then there was the problem of Susan. Susan was the weak musical link. Not that any of us was a power-awesome magic-woman on her chosen instrument, although Margie had the makings of a knock-your-socks-off bass player. She came up with lovely, quirky, memorable bass lines, but they were melodic rather than your standard bass-and-drums-as-rhythm-section parts. Coupled with our voices, which carried us far, Gael, Meegan, and I were passable guitar players, and improving all the time. Susan, though... it was frustrating.

Susan could play any weird-ass beat you put in front of her. Reggae? She was rock steady. That signature Bo Diddley beat? She could lay that sucker down like there was no tomorrow, where my forearm started cramping after about twelve bars. But a straight 4/4 rock beat? Limp as a string of linguini. There was no snap to it. And she just could not keep the tempo steady. Throughout any given song, she'd just start flagging. She'd slow down to where there was no feel left.

As the designated rhythm guitar player (and, with Gael and Meegan switching off guitar duty depending on which one of them was singing lead, the only full-time guitarist in the band), it fell to me to keep the tempo up. Since my stage stance borrowed heavily from John Lennon circa '63 (legs slightly apart, knees bent, subtly bouncing to the beat), I would try to keep Susan going. And if she started slowing down, I'd bounce more emphatically to try to speed her up. More often than not this would work, but it would also piss her off. And once she was pissed at me, she would conveniently start losing her grasp on her left drumstick. Somehow, it would go flying out of her fist on a trajectory straight for my derriere. On a bad night, she could send half a dozen sticks or more sailing straight for my ass!

The thing is, we knew that if we were going to grab that brass ring, we had to replace Susan. And nobody wanted to do that. She had quit grad school to practice full time. She practiced all day on her own, and then she practiced or played out with us most every night. She put in more time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears than any of us. And it was becoming clearer and clearer that she would be the only one of us who would be left behind if we really did take off to the toppermost of the poppermost. And worst of all, she was our friend. How do you fire a friend? How do you even THINK of firing a friend?

The guilt and the frustration that caused wore on us all, and we ended up taking out a lot of it on Susan herself. Nobody was worse about it than I was. I'm not proud of that. Not at all. But it's the truth. By the summer of 1980, the cracks were showing, and they were widening alarmingly.

We were planning to cut a single in early September, once we got back from a week of gigs in Cleveland, Gael's hometown. After that, Gary was trying to set us up some gigs in Manhattan. The big time! But Cleveland came first.

Now, a pause for some context. Ever since that night we got stuck in the studio (see the previous entry), we used to laugh that the song we'd been trying to record, "August Is a Wicked Month" (we were big Edna O'Brien fans), was jinxed. In addition to the tons of takes we'd done without getting anything good down, we were recording the song in the month of August. And now, almost exactly a year later, we were headed for Cleveland. And among the dives we'd booked, we actually had some prestige clubs booked as well. And an appearance on "Afternoon Exchange," a local TV program:



For some reason, they weren't equipped to mic the drums properly, so Susan just stood there holding her drumsticks and swaying as we performed "My Boy."

The gigs were up and down--one place turned out to be an erstwhile strip club, and the audience didn't quite know what to make of us. Really short skirts... but they're not taking them off?? Heh. One gig, though, at a club on Euclid near the university, was glorious:



We were "on" like never before, and even Susan was playing like a pro. People were dancing like crazy. It was such a rush, and I remember clearly sitting in our closet of a dressing room between sets and thinking "This is what I want to do when I grow up. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life." Famous almost last words...

There had been quite a spotlight on Gael throughout the week of gigs. It was her hometown, after all. But we were all kind of sniping at each other. And trying our best to find time away from each other. We were too much in each others' pockets, and the split was largely three ways: Meegan and Margie on one side, Gael and I on the other, and Susan way out in no-man's-land.

But things seemed pretty good the night we played out last gig:



Oddly enough, I wore one of Gael's dresses that night--in fact, I wore the dress she wore for our very first gig. Of course, none of us--except maybe Meegan and Margie...maybe--knew that it would be our last gig.

A few days after we returned, Meegan and Margie called a band meeting and told us they were quitting. They were going to move to Rochester and start a band with their boyfriends. And that was it. August, as it turned out, was still a wicked month.

Susan moved back to Miami, where her family lived. She got married soon thereafter, and now she's a mom and a bankruptcy attorney in Baltimore.

Gael and I put another girl band together called "Only Desire." This one was a little harder rocking than the Poptarts--sort of a distaff Stones rather than Beatles. Well, in concept if not in execution!



It, too, fell apart after a year or so.

Then I teamed up with Meegan and Margie again in the original line up of the Antoinettes:



That band far outlasted my involvement in it... I left it after about a year or so to follow my then significant other to Boston, where he was trying to get his budding comedy career off the ground. Before that, he had been the frontman of the re-formed Tearjerkers (minus Buddy Love). Small world, huh?

The Antoinettes, originally based in Rochester, replaced me with a keyboard player and a hot guitarist (Meegan became the singer and the singer only) and moved to New York City shortly after I moved to Boston. They played there for years and, like the Poptarts, kept almost grabbing the brass ring... but New-Wave Superstardom eluded them as well, and they disbanded eventually after the longest run of all three bands, by far.

The last time I heard from Margie, she was married and living in Westchester and working as a graphic designer. That was at least a decade ago. Gael stayed in Syracuse, married one of the Tearjerkers--a rhythm guitarist--and immersed herself in getting her PhD. She still teaches at S.U., and she and her husband play in a trio called "Knickers in a Twist" now and then. Meegan is now married to a well-known and respected drummer. They live in Manhattan, and they have recently put out a CD as The Verbs. It's worth a listen. I quite enjoyed it.

And me? Well, I went from being an integral part of the local music scene



back to being an ardent fan.



But one thing is for certain: I'll always be a Poptart. I'd like to think that all five of us would be proud to say that.

Oh, and by the way... August is no longer a wicked month. I met Jeff in August. And the next August after that, I married him. So there.

Fresh from the Toaster!

Some Poptarts trivia:

Just as with the Ball Turret Gunners, we all took on stage names, although these were more "pop" names than "punk" names. Mostly they harkened back to the British Invasion. I became Cathy Kensington (I liked the alliteration, but I was not about to change my C to a K for symmetry's sake). Gael S. became Gael McGear (a nod to Paul McCartney's brother, Mike McGear). Susan J. became Susan Mersey (get it? as in beat?). Margie F. became Margie Shears (sister, no doubt, to Billy). And Debby R. became Meegan Voss... and eventually she became Meegan Voss for real and true and legal.

We never, ever played out the first cover tune we learned, which was "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies. We came up with a killer harmony arrangement for it with vocals that swirled all around each other, but we couldn't figure out a way to end it properly. And once we had figured out how to do segues, it just didn't occur to us to resurrect a cover.

We never played out the first original we wrote, either, which was inspired by a story in the Weekly World News. It was called "Baby Elvis," and was about an infant who was said to look just like Elvis as a lad. There were photos to compare, with the supposed reincarnation's gas-inspired sneer providing all the evidence anyone could need.

Margie created a signature stage move, a kind of dreamy back and forth shifting that we called "doing the Ventura," after the model of her first used bass.

And, yeah. Before we ever played out, we had a logo and t-shirts:


Here is Gael, modeling a blue one for the folks in NYC.

Anyway... we were on our way. The very first time Susan played the drums officially was on our three-song demo. Gary Allen, local radio DJ, had a new wave show called "Off the Boat" that aired on Sunday nights. He played imports and demos or singles from local bands. He asked us for a tape, so we pulled Gary Frenay and Arty Lenin from the Flashcubes and Ducky Carlisle from a band called the Ohms to record us on Frenay's state-of-the-art four-track reel-to-reel. It was recorded in the upstairs flat Gael and Susan and I shared on Lancaster in Syracuse's student ghetto. We recorded "I Won't Let You Let Me Go" and "Glad She's Gone" (the bitch song from hell about how happy we were that Paul, also of the Flashcubes, and his harridan of a girl friend had broken up--alas, they reunited by the time we recorded the song...) with Susan debuting on drums. The third song, "My Boy," was accompanied only by Arty playing a classical guitar as Meegan, Gael, and I sang. It was a ballad that originally was called "Everybody's Love," in "honor" of our inspiration, Buddy Love (get it? Every Buddy's Love?), who also turned out to be a heartbreaker. Well, according to Meegan. All of the songs were originals. They were pretty rough sounding, but good enough to play on the radio. We went into the studio for an interview when Gary Allen first played the tapes, and we talked about how we envisioned product placement schemes (Meegan Makeup!) and how we wanted our pictures on lunch boxes. Like the Beatles, we were sure we were headed to the toppermost of the poppermost!

Gary Allen became our manager.

And he had contacts.

One of them was Harvey, a rather famous producer, then at Epic. Harvey didn't think we were right for Epic--not yet at least--but he did start bringing A&R guys around to see us. Those were heady times!

We played dives and we played respectable gigs. We opened for national acts, including the Tourists, an early vehicle for Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, pre-Eurythmics. Their roadies stole our tambourine. Bastards! We opened for Robin Lane and the Chartbusters--her bass player was the session man who played bass on the Archies album--Sugar, Sugar! See how the fates were aligning?

It wasn't all fun and games... we got threatened with eviction for practicing in our flat (although the frat boys on the first floor had the police around every single weekend, threatening to break up their keggers--we, on the other hand, were practicing on weeknights...). So we found a practice space in a west-side church hall. That lasted until someone broke into the storage closet and stole Susan's sparkly silver Lugwigs. She somehow got her parents to front her some money (they didn't yet know, I don't think, that she had dropped out of grad school to practice full time), and she bought a brand new set of Ludwigs--these were candy apple red. We found another church hall... this time on the east side of town. We practiced every night we didn't have a gig. The only days we took off were the days after gigs... unless we had another gig scheduled. Looking back on it, we played out a LOT.

We played a military base up near Lake Ontario. If you've seen This Is Spinal Tap, you can pretty much imagine what that was like. Except that we were five women in skirts hemmed up to our asses, and there was no stage. It was right after the dismal failure of the attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages and, in some kind of misplaced effort to win these leering, slavering guys to our side, Susan decided to pipe up and dedicate a song to the hostages. The response? The whole hall erupted in shouts of "Fuck Iran! Fuck Iran!" The shouts soon morphed into a chant. And we somehow found a way to get ourselves and our gear out of there before the testosterone-crazed mob converged on us!

We plucked a plum of a gig opening the season up at Alexandria Bay--gateway to the Thousand Islands. Or so we thought. Turns out the promoter who booked us got the date wrong. Our gig was actually the weekend BEFORE the season opened, and so we played to a cavernous and pretty much empty hall. We looked good, though!


Left to right, Margie, Meegan, Me, Gael, and Susan, in the "dressing room" at Alex Bay

Another bit of trivia: Several years after this gig, the promoter was found dead in a parking lot in Syracuse. He'd been shot in the head. I wonder whose gig he screwed up to deserve THAT? Yikes.

We had some wonderful times, though. We played twice at Dobbs on South Street in Philly. Dobbs is a bonafide rock 'n' roll institution, and they had us back! We played the Haunt in Ithaca, which had really cool t-shirts. We asked if we could have some, and when the management said no, we had to buy them (BUY them?? We've been selling your beer and filling your coffers for three frickin' sets, ya skinflint!), we found several boxes full of them in the dressing room and just helped ourselves. I think that was the moment when we realized that we really, truly had become a band! What punks we were, bonding over petty larceny!

And we had some adventures--some were great highs, like when we were grocery shopping after rehearsal a little after midnight one morning at Price Chopper on Erie Boulevard, and we heard one of our songs, "Jealousy," come on the radio that was playing through the PA system in the store. We screamed and ran down the aisles, we were so excited! So what if it was the middle of the night! We were on the radio!

Other adventures were not so much fun. For example, we agreed to record an LP side with some wannabe producers who were looking to get a label deal for themselves, and if they did, they would bring us with them. Except they turned out to be jerks and no-talents (and what a surprise THAT was... hmmm). They recorded us at the facilities at Newhouse, on the Syracuse University campus, at night. All night. And Susan, who tried her hardest--harder than anyone else in the band, without a doubt--just wasn't quite up to snuff. Because we were looking for a "live" sound, we recorded all the instrumental tracks as a band, but that meant that if any one of us fucked up, the whole take was lost. One night we did more than 70 takes of "August Is a Wicked Month," most of them due to drum issues--and most of those drum issues occurring right at the end of the song. When we finally decided to give up (it was about 5 AM, and we would have to relinquish the suite to students soon), the door stuck and we couldn't get out of the studio! Argh! And after all that, when we finally heard the tapes, the assholes had stripped out all the instruments anyway and put in lame synthesizers and drum machines! Sigh...

But despite it all, it was wonderful to be a part of something so creative and all-consuming. We had label interest. People were telling us we really WERE going to go to the toppermost of the poppermost... and we started making lists of things we'd buy when we were rich. Things like custom short-scale Les Pauls with hot-pink polka dots and Telecasters finished in turquoise glitter. But you know what they say about pride and wish lists coming before a fall...

To be continued...

Birth of the Poptarts

Just like the protagonist in my fledgling novel, I went north to school (well, to grad school) with rather lofty and serious ambitions: I wanted to be a medievalist and teach in a university. My destination was central New York rather than Manhattan, though, and Syracuse University. Why Syracuse? They gave me the most money and a teaching assistantship.

It is odd, though, now that I think of it. When I was applying, I had a short list of schools. I had already been offered a free ride at my alma mater, which was then Madison College, but I wanted a change. I applied and was accepted at William and Mary, Vanderbilt, and Duke, but of those, only William and Mary offered any financial assistance, and that was in the form of a research assistantship. I didn't relish the idea of doing some professor's research for him or her. Then there was Syracuse. I had put my hand on the catalog while browsing grad school catalogs in the library one day and thought, "Say... maybe I should go north." So I applied. And along came the teaching assistantship. So north I went.

I decided about two weeks into that first semester that a) I hated teaching (could that have had something to do with teaching English 101?) and b) I was thoroughly sick of going to school. I'd been in some sort of school since I stepped inside Mrs. Wright's Playtime Nursery School at the age of four. I was tired of the whole thing. But here I was... might as well slog through. Maybe it would grow on me again.

Before too long, I was part of a little clique of fellow first year English department TAs who were also struggling with the whole nightmare of teaching bored kids "General Essays" (you don't want to know): Gael, who was in the poetry workshop; Marie, who was in the fiction workshop; and Susan, who was a Shakespeare fanatic. We did a lot of kvetching about the department and our fellow grad students. We tried to find something amusing to keep us occupied in Syracuse during its snowiest winter on record. We didn't have much luck. Although one weekend we stumbled upon the Casa di Lisa, a jazz dive in an old diner on Erie Boulevard, where one of our professors was playing piano with a trio. I think he played piano. Anyway, the trio played "Alice Blue Gown" for an hour. That was all they played, while we tried to force down drinks made with powdered mixers. At least the place had a nice seedy bordello-ish vibe. That's the bar, up top of this post. Here are Marie and Gael enjoying the show:



We needed a change. It came in the form of a fellow grad student, Mark Roberts. Or, as he was known on the local music scene, Buddy Love.



He was the front man for a local band called Buddy Love and the Tearjerkers, and we started going out to clubs to watch him play. The band was pretty sloppy, and Buddy was the sloppiest of all, but they were also very engaging. The first time we saw them, they opened for a band called the Flashcubes, the premier "New Wave" band in town. We thought they were way too slick, compared with the Tearjerkers. Har! But we were inspired. If Mark could be in a band, we could too. And Gael and I, at least, could play guitar a bit. And we could sing. And Gael was a poet. She could write lyrics. Pretty soon, we had a pretend band going. It was called The Ball Turret Gunners. What can I say? We were English majors. Who needed real gigs? We had t-shirts made.



We still mostly sat around and kvetched about the department and our students and all, but now we also played guitars and Gael and I would sing Beatles songs and our own originals--ditties such as "Cock of the Wok" (a paean to our favorite Chinese take-out emporium, the Ding-How) and "Lookin' for a Munchkin Mama" (a politically incorrect glance into the psyche of the department's "little person," who also happened to be a rather loathsome troll and would have been so had he been six feet tall). We took on punk pseudonyms: I was "Whippet Out," Gael was "Knickers Down" (to form the songwriting team of Down and Out), Susan was "Bertha d'Blues" (get it?), and I forget what Marie's moniker was.

But then Buddy stopped singing with the band and the Tearjerkers went on hiatus. We began to go see the Flashcubes more, as well as other local bands on the budding punk/new wave scene. One day, we heard that two other girls whom we saw regularly at all the gigs--Meegan and Margie--were going to put a band together--and their name was going to be The Poptarts. We heard they were going to be at the party after Buddy's poetry reading for his thesis, so Gael and I made a tape. We turned off the voice tracks on some of the early Beatles songs (you could do that on the older Beatles LPs--the "stereo" was voices through one speaker and instruments through the other) and recorded ourselves against the instrumental tracks. Gael sang lead, and I sang harmony. We took it to the party and slipped it in the tape deck and Meegan flipped out and cried "It's my dream!" Susan and Gael and I came back from the party no longer Ball Turret Gunners but Poptarts. Marie hadn't gone to the party, and anyway, she was not all that into the whole music scene anyway. She kind of drifted away...

But the Poptarts became a real band. Margie had been learning bass--she had an instrument. Meegan borrowed a Gretsch from her boyfriend Arty, who was the lead guitar player for the Flashcubes. (She later bought herself a powder blue Fender Mustang.) I persuaded my brother to lend me his 1959 short scale Gibson Melody Maker until I could afford my own guitar (which turned out to be my lovely 3/4 scale Rick). Gael was going to be the singer (but she later acquired a black lefty strat--her being a lefty and all, and she and Meegan would trade off lead vocals). Susan bought a set of drums and started to practice, but until she was up to speed, Arty sat in on drums and Susan was our go-go dancer. (Really!) We started practicing, wrote a few songs, learned a few covers, and within three weeks we were playing out, opening for a local band. by our third gig, we were sharing the night with the Dead Ducks (another new-ish band--they couldn't really play either, so we were a good match!). Here is photo evidence of the gig--and notice: Susan is dancing!



By our fifth gig, Susan was sitting behind the drums, and we were opening for a national act, the Laughing Dogs. (Never heard of them? I'm not surprised!) And suddenly we had a real manager and label interest.

To be continued...

Okay, Okay...

GW wants an excerpt from the novel, and since I have been planning on writing about my life as an aspiring New Wave superstar, I thought I would offer this snippet from the book where Grace, the main character, tells her new friend Stuart about her experience as a Sugar Pop:

“So, you were in a band, huh? What was your name?”

“Don’t tell me you never heard of the Sugar Pops!” Grace affected outrage.

“Sorry, can’t say that I have. Should I?”

“Nah. We used to play weekend gigs on the Thruway circuit every month or so. We were all in college, so we couldn’t go on the road all that much. And, well, it’s hard to get decent gigs in Manhattan. Lots of dives, too much competition for the good rooms. We did okay, though—five girls in short skirts, bopping and playing our own sixties-type pop songs, singing angelic harmonies. That was a good angle.”

“You played... let’s see. Bass.”

“Nope. Rhythm guitar. And I sang the high harmonies and arranged most of the vocals. I still have some demo tapes. That is, I think I do. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went south, too. You’re welcome to listen to them, if I can find them.”

“I’d love to hear them.” Stuart took his eyes off the road for a moment to study Grace. “You’re just full of surprises.”

“I am?” Grace was actually flirting.

“Well, I always thought of you as so serious, so studious. You don’t seem the type to run off to join the circus, if you know what I mean.”

“You’ve formed quite an opinion, for someone who never spoke to me before yesterday.”

“I’m sorry. I just meant that, oh, you seemed so intense back then. In high school. I don’t know.” Stuart was suddenly flustered, shy.

Grace decided to let him off the hook. “I never expected to join a band, either.” She smiled and shook her head. “I was serious. I had no idea what I was going to do when I went up to NYU, only that it was going to be something intellectual and New Yorky. Philosophy, maybe. I hooked up with Maeve and Sarah in an English class. One night we went to CBGB’s to see what all the fuss was about. Maeve was a huge Beatles fan, and she had a bunch of old dolly girl dresses and go-go boots, so we dressed up and headed out. It caused such a stir in this dive of a club that we started to go back every weekend. Pretty soon, we noticed a couple of other girls dressed kind of like us, Gretchen and Maggie. Gretchen’s boyfriend was in a band and he had an extra guitar. And Maggie was learning bass. We decided we had to be able to play as well as some of the guy bands, so I went to a pawn shop and bought a little three-quarter-neck Rickenbacker. Sarah told her parents that she needed extra money for books and bought a sparkly silver drum kit. Maeve decided she’d be the singer. Two weeks later, we were playing loft parties, doing Shirelles and Beatles covers and one or two originals. Then we started playing bars. East Village dives, basements mostly. Suddenly, we had a manager who booked those upstate weekends for us. He even got some record labels interested—well, quite a few, actually—but we never got to sign on anyone’s dotted line.”

“And what about school?”

“Oh, Sarah dropped out to practice full-time, but she never told her parents. Maeve and I became English majors. We were always reading, anyway. Might as well get credit for it. School didn’t seem all that important anymore, but my folks were shelling out the money, so I kept at it. Good thing, too. By the time Brandon showed up, the band was self-destructing—the stress of almost getting contract after contract was tearing us apart, and we only had about six good months left in us.

“The end was spectacular, though. Sarah’s dad was a Miami probate attorney, a very stern and humorless man. Her parents came to a conference in New York and decided to visit her. Now, although she hadn’t told them about dropping out, she had told them something about the band, and I guess her dad saw a poster for a gig while they were trying to find Sarah on campus. They showed up at the club, which was bad enough. But that particular night we’d decided not to wear our usual sixties gear. We advertised the gig as a pajama party and wore baby-dolls. Instead of our usual tights, we painted big splashy daisies on our legs, like they used to do on Laugh In. You should have seen Sarah’s parents! Her dad tried to get on stage and pull her right off the drums, but the bouncers tossed him out. The next thing you know, Sarah’s on her way back to Miami. Last we heard she’d married a doctor.

“We tried auditioning other drummers, and almost everyone who showed up was a better drummer than Sarah. To be honest, Sarah had always been kind of the weak link, although none of us could play as well as we could sing and write. But without Sarah, the chemistry was gone. We ended up sniping at each other—no one could agree on anything. Pretty soon we weren’t really speaking to each other. You know—the standard story.

“Gretchen and Maggie started another band with their boyfriends. Maeve dropped out and got a gig singing torch songs in a piano bar. I hung out with Brandon and finished my degree and started writing about the Village scene for teen magazines. Just a fluke, really—met an editor for Ingenue at a party and left with an assignment. Then Brandon decided his career would blossom if only he could get to San Francisco, and off we went."

So... that's the fictional account of a band very much like the Poptarts. And just as a teaser for the real thing... we really did appear at a gig wearing baby doll pajamas (although I think we wore tights rather than painted our legs a la Laugh-In). We only did one other gig where we didn't wear minis, and that was at this gig in Cleveland where for some reason we wore leotards, tights, and hot-pants:

All Mod Cons (The Jam)

In honor of my newly replenished iPod workout playlist (734 songs--only around 2 gigs so far and counting--as opposed to the 182 songs that used to fill it to capacity) here's a meme I pilfered from somewhere so long ago that I don't even recall where it came from. Yeah, it's kind of silly, but most memes are, aren't they? And some of the entries are rather spot on, if I do say so myself!

Enjoy!

Directions:
1. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, iPod etc. on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS

1.IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY?
Crawling from the Wreckage (Dave Edmunds)

2.HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
Twisted (Joni Mitchell) (!!!)

3. WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Words (The Poptarts)

Yea! Can you guess which of those lovely ladies of song is me? (Hint, you can look straight up my nose! Yikes!)

4. HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
Shakin’ All Over (The Flamin’ Groovies)

5. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
Dancing in the Street (The Mamas and the Papas)

6. WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Won’t Get Fooled Again (The Who)

7. WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Glad All Over (Dave Clark Five)

8. WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
My Little Angel (The Flashcubes)

9. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
High Fidelity (Elvis Costello)

10. WHAT IS 2 + 2?
I’ll Be Doggone (Marvin Gaye)

11. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR EX?
Shop Around (Smokey Robinson and the Miracles)

12. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Carnival Time (Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias)

13. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
Leader of the Pack (The Shangri-Las) (I'll say! LOL!)

14. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Play that Fast Thing (One More Time) Rockpile

15. WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE? (Isn't this really the same as #12?)
We’re Going to Be Friends (The White Stripes)

16. WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Don’t Panic (Coldplay) (!!!)

17. WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Fujiyama Mama (Wanda Jackson)

18. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?
Back in My Arms Again (The Supremes)

19. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
If Not for You (George Harrison)

20. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Get Rhythm (NRBQ)

Now press Next one more time and use it as your title.
(See title of this entry)