A Jen Too Many

Now that I'm old, I can afford to buy all the music I longed for so desperately when I was a teenager, but could never afford. And might I point out, it's a lot of fun?

I didn't have my first real job until after high school. Until then, I got all my money through babysitting, and while I was thrilled to be making $1/hour (remember, minimum wage back then was only $3.35), a few hours here and there on the weekends did not add up to much spending money.

Lacking the funds to patronize the mall's lone music store, I resorted to taping my favorites off the radio. I'd wait, finger poised over the red-daubed "record" button, waiting breathlessly for the first few notes of the song I wanted to tape. As soon as I thought I heard it, I'd smash my finger down - and then, frequently, had to stop and rewind, because it wasn't the song I thought it was. (I remember sitting on the living room balcony*, listening to Casey Kasem count down the year's top 100 hits on New Year's Eve, trying to get 99 Red Balloons, while my dad yelled at me to turn off the radio, come downstairs, and join the family.)

I listened to those tapes for years. They disappeared eventually, of course, but I can still remember all the words to those songs. I remember the order they played in on my tapes. And now I'm buying them all as mp3s. I have found that when you only have to buy one song at a time, and it's only 99 cents, it's ridiculously easy to wind up with huge amounts of music before you know what's happened.

Old? Me? Naah. Not while I still know all the words to Our House!
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*Ah, yes, the balcony. Our house was an A-frame that Dad bought while Mom was with the kids at our old house in another state. It was built by a guy who had a justifiably bad reputation. In fact, one of his previous houses had actually split down the middle, we were informed (several times, by different people.) The living room carpet was long red shag; the upstairs master bedroom was the same shag in purple. The dining area was wallpapered in a red-flocked and gold-foil wallpaper that was straight out of a movie bordello, and there was dark, dark paneling everywhere.** The living room ceiling only covered half the room; the other half was a cathedral-type ceiling that opened onto a long balcony (not a romantic Romeo and Juliet type of balcony - this was more like a room cut in half lengthwise) with an edge protected only by flimsy dark-stained spindles. My parents used it as an office and storage area. My brother used it as a launching pad for his parachuting Lego people.

**Years later, when my mother was finally able to do something about all the ugliness she tried to take down the paneling, only to realize that there was no drywall underneath. Furthermore, the builder had evidently ascribed to the philosophy that you should never use two nails when you can get away with one, so the nails that connected the molding to the top of the wall, were the same nails connecting the paneling to the studs inside the wall. She finally wound up doing something terribly clever and creative with texture and paint that made the walls bright and cheerful without having to spend a small fortune getting the entire house drywalled.