The Police album Synchronicity is 30 years old on June 1. And so is everything else about the summer of 1983.
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Go get me a spoon
This Real People clip of a valley-girl competition in 1982 in the Sherman Oaks Galleria (RIP) hurts in about a hundred different ways. All those Beths and Lauras and Laurens and Loryns and Lauries and Loris — to think (on birthday eve), they’re all in their 40s now, regretting the many afternoons they slathered up in baby oil and laid out. Now the doctors have to literally bag their faces and zap off the melanomas.
I loved the valley girls then and I still do, and may I just add: It never went away. You can hear it across, like, generations now. You can hear (I hope just a trace of) it every time I open my mouth.
One-Man Book Club takes a moment to ponder the wondrous mediocrity of Belinda Carlisle
What seemed like half the freshman class of Bishop McGuinness High School went to see the Go-Go’s on their Vacation tour at the Oklahoma City Myriad Center University of Oklahoma Lloyd Noble Center (speak, memory! Or speak, Derba! Or, you know who would really know — Andrea Martinez). Thanks to the interwebs, I can at least confirm that this happened on October 2, 1982. We had the beat.
Ode to Derba
Derba and the hubs, Dan.
Had a fleeting breakfast in McKinney, Texas, yesterday morning with Laura Froelich, known as “Derba” to those of us who go way back. People who’ve read the dedication (but not the acknowledgments) in Tinsel ask who this Laura person is that she would rank above not only my mother (also a dedicatee) but also Michael (oh yeah, him). (And yet she is not the same Laura — Trujillo — to whom I dedicated Off Ramp.)
‘Cause it’s the gift that’ll live and live …
Is it a book tour or just a long nostalgia trip? And is it my own nostalgia, or some longer epic nostalgia trip that anticipates the demise of the printed word? Yikes! In any case, strap in…