“...You know, you... you make me feel so good inside. I always wanted a girl just like you… such a purity… Pretty Young Thing...”
It’s Christmastime in the city. You have just entered a downtown Old Navy clothing store where you are focused on buying only a new pair of cheap yet quality jeans and perhaps a nice dress shirt. Immediately upon entering you realize that Old Navy is a shopper’s cabaret complete with a full-functioning, three-dimensional musical number featuring helpful headset-wearing employees jumping in every direction to the rhythm of Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)”.
Buckle yourself down into the sleigh and whip out the eggnog…
It seems like at the beginning of the Christmas season each year more and more people are complaining, “Christmas just keeps creeping up earlier and earlier every year”. Of course they mean ‘creeping up’ in reference to a corporate push to drive consumers into stores all the sooner. I wondered if this was really true so I got an expert opinion on the matter from my grandmother. Apparently everything is just fine. She claims that the infiltration of Christmas is false and that people have been barking about it since Christmas’ conception.
Dara and I browsed through a supermarket busy celebrating National Cake Frosting Month. The store was aglow with front aisle displays of Pillsbury confetti spreads and Betty Crocker’s new buttery whipped gold icing. This new creamy concoction was especially exciting because it was flecked with bits of edible gold sugar granulates that sparkled under the supermarket day-glo.
Dara and I ran carelessly from aisle to aisle, bumping into the carts filled with boxes of cake flour and pints of ready-to-spread frosting. The produce section was located at the back of the store and completely empty with the exception of one lone tangerine. A misty spray of water spat from an overhead pipe. Its purpose was to keep the vegetables glistening and moist but here it served only to make mud from the grim at the bottom portion of the fruit and vegetable bins.
Apple recently updated their iPod product line, which included a new slickly designed video Nano and a touch screen 16GB iPod that mimics the look of the iPhone. The most exciting addition to this family for me has been the iPod Classic with it’s 160GB of drive space. This amount of digital storage is a huge improvement over the mere 60GB on my previous player. For the past several months I’ve been moving tracks from my 120GB laptop to my Mac Mini’s 320GB external hard drive in order to store music I couldn’t use because of limited iPod space. Now that I have the new 160GB iPod, my next plan is to replace my now ancient Mac Mini with a newfangled iMac that has 1TB of external hard drive. (That’s one whole terabyte, 1000 gigabytes!!) It seems that computer life is a never-ending series of upgrades… and for me, the more space available for collecting music, the better.
Now that Midnight Mass is over and a busy summer season of brunch service at the café has ended, it’s time for a vacation. This comes at a perfect time because day after day of restaurant work has left me feeling burnt out. At some point it’s hard not to get sick from constantly satisfying the needs of total strangers. Sometimes their demands often leave me feeling taken advantage of.
Digging through the country record bins of Amoeba, I came across a plain white record sleeve with “Crystal Gayle Interview Promo” scribbled across the top right hand corner in black sharpie. It was a Solid Gold Country music radio show recorded in 1988. Inside the record’s sleeve was a programming sheet that included all of the show’s major sponsor ads geared towards the geriatric crowd with plugs for Folgers coffee and several over-the-counter cold medicines.
When it was decided that Flash Gordon would be screened for the 10th season of Midnight Mass, I was assigned to putting together the movie’s pre-show. I jumped at the opportunity as soon as it presented itself. When I was a wee lad, Flash showed on HBO frequently and I watched it enough times that its gaudy camp sensibilities became lodged in my brain for eternity. Dino de Laurentiis’ over-the-top production also introduced me to the flamboyant rock music of Queen.
Happy, Happy, Happy is a musically enhanced version of a short story I wrote a few years ago for a blog called the Clumsy Twirler Diaries. The story is about my employment at the Disney Store and it was part of a series of stories I wrote about working in a shopping mall. The inspiration for writing these tales came after reading David Sedaris’ short story “The Santaland Diaries”, which describes Sedaris’ working as an Elf at a Macy’s Department Store during Christmastime.
Midnight Mass at the Bridge Theater this past weekend featured a screening of Xanadu with projected ‘sing-a-long’ lyrics and a preshow that included drag queen roller derby. My two tasks for this weekend's show were simple: put together a 45-minute set of music by Olivia Newton John (minus any of the songs from Xanadu) and compile a PowerPoint presentation of surtitles to serve as the shows sing-a-long lyrics.
Putting together the sonic sounds of Olivia Newton John was a fun job. I started the mix with some of my favorite ONJ tunes including ‘Soul Kiss’ and ‘A Little More Love’ and ended with crowd pleasers like ‘Grease Megamix’ and a thumping house version of ‘Physical’. The crowd that night was in good spirits with many audience members in costumes that included athletic headbands and tube socks galore.
The idea of compiling Dolly Parton’s more pop-oriented material came in 1996 when my obsession with her music was in overdrive. Of course I love Dolly’s more country sounding records but there was something fun and absurd about focusing attention on her musical output from the late 70’s. Before that time Dolly Parton’s music was, to some degree, polished and derivative of the countrypolitan Nashville sound but in 1977 she decided to set her sights on superstardom. Helmed by a gay manager named Sandy Gallin, Dolly was sold to the masses as sexy, vibrant, and larger than life.
