"Classical" Music!

So the other day my favorite radio news program, "Rush Limbaugh", had some other guy doing the show rather than Rush himself, which to me is unacceptable, and forced me to scan the radio stations for alternative entertainment, which I found in the form of "music" on a station that only played hits from the 60's, 70's, and 80's, (you know, the really OLD stuff) ! As a rule, I listen to either "country" music or "talk" radio, but this station happened to be playing Elton Johns hit song "Bennie and the Jets", so I decided to listen for awhile, and they played song after song from the days of my youth, forcing me to relive many parts of my junior high years, some of which was good, and some not so good, even embarrassing, like the time when I was in sixth grade and the whole school was in the gymnasium to watch a program being put on by a magician, and I decided to suddenly come down with a case of the flu and ran downstairs into the locker room and puked my guts out! The acoustics in that gym, especially from the locker rooms, has to be the envy of many of the top tier of institutions which teach students in matters such as "sound engineering", because the whole upstairs erupted into uncontrollable laughter. Knowing that they were laughing at ME, I was left with basically only two reasonable options: "Evaporation", which is where I would just disappear into a sort of thin, vapory mist, or my personal favorite, which was to suddenly burst into flames by way of "spontaneous combustion", and burn down to a pile of ashes so small that our school custodian, (Jakie Amen), could easily sweep me into a small baggie and send me home to my parents. With a note of course. I've actually revisited this memory time after time during the course of my adult life, and have found that I can control it pretty good with medication. Then the radio station played "The night Chicago Died", which was a huge hit song during about the time when I was in the eighth grade, and was taking seventh grader Cathy Anderson to our junior high dance as my date. I especially remember driving my Plymouth Fury out to Cathy's farm house to pick her up that evening, thinking that I had to be the actual epitome of "cool", right up until the time I got out of my car and started walking up to her house, and her dad "Bob" suddenly jumped out from behind a tree and fired his shotgun into the air, yelling "stay away from my daughter"! As it turned out, Bob was just joking around, trying to get a few laughs in! I thought Bob was a real riot, and in my appreciation for good humor I made damn sure that I had Cathy back home a full half hour before her curfew time. The dance itself was actually pretty good, and even though our music was great, many of the songs were nearly impossible to dance to with any kind of grace or dignity, as if we really cared about such things. When they'd play "Bennie and the Jets", the actual rythum of the song seemed to change so often that nobody really knew what to do! One minute, you'd be slow dancing, holding each other, and then Elton would go off on a spiel of yelling out "Bennie" several times in a row, and we would all just back away and stare at each other, as if we'd just discovered that our dancing partner had committed a horrible crime or something, and we were struggling emotionally on whether or not to turn them over to the authorities. "The Night Chicago Died" was even worse, as it left the dancers with no option other than to shake abnormally while flailing their arms around wildly and saying "na na na na na na na na na na NA na na, in the same way as Liberal Democrats do today, when the Republicans try to convince them to get jobs and work like the rest of us. The Rolling Stones and BTO finally came along and put an end to most of this dance foolishness, offering a radical new kind of music wherein you could just stand in a darkened corner of the gym with your buddies and just look "cool", or if the "cool" look wasn't right for you, you could use the same music from either of these two bands to look either "tough" or "bored". It was pretty universal music in that particular way, plus it was seriously adaptable to playing "air guitar" to. I suppose what really matters is that we had fun together and learned about life together, even if our "moves" out on the floor tended to make us look like a large group of adolescents whom had suddenly gone into a series of harsh seizures due to a severe stroke which we had suffered only moments earlier, and we were only passing the time it would take for the ambulance to get there by mingling together out on the floor. I hope the kids today have as much fun as we had, cause once you're all grown up it tends to turn into all work and no play. At least I know it did for me, as I rarely have time to play "air guitar" anymore. I'm not even sure where I put it since this last move. My guess is the basement. Have a great week Friends, and until next Sunday, May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You!