Living In Oz: The Album (Part 1)

or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Springfield"

Gloria - Laura Brannigan (mp3)
Always Something There to Remind Me - Naked Eyes (mp3)

In the spring of 1983, I was in the fifth grade.

My teacher was an intimidating black woman named Mamie. She pronounced "R" as "arr-uh." She adored me, which on occasion created some awkward playground moments where I was forced to defend myself against those Mrs. Hamler didn't like. Her preferred punishment for misbehavior was making students hand-copy dictionary words from Webster's, character for character. The standard punishment was 50, but I remember three occasions when she assigned 300. Everyone giggled when she assigned someone to "start with the arr-uhs."

One of our most beloved recess pastimes was Mad Libs. The entire goal of Mad Libs, by the spring of 1983, was to fill out the entire sheet using only cuss words. Fifth grade was when I truly began to learn just how versatile the word "fuck" and its derivatives could be. Ironically, even by completely destroying the innocuous spirit of the activity, the activity still honed my understanding of the parts of speech. So it wasn't all a   fucking   (adjective) loss.

The other favorite recess activity was Tetherball. Tetherball never had a chance at being an actual competitve sport; therefore, I was pretty good at it. In fact, if I wasn't the best Tetherball player in the school, I was in the running in spite of not being particularly tall. (And anyone who's played Tetherball can attest to the supreme value of height in that game.)

The ecstasy of Tetherball was that, in the most intense match-ups, a cool-under-fire attitude didn't really help. Some of the best Tetherball players were absolute spazzes. Like me. Once your opponent got the right angle on you, and that ball started sailing over your head and wrapping tighter around the pole, you could hope to perfectly time your jump to save your game, or you could flail and spaz and hope that your panicky desperation somehow stopped the momentum. It felt about like the odds of Luke Skywalker firing those torpedoes into that little toilet hole on the outside of the Death Star. But if you could make that one key jump, sometimes the entire tide of the game shifted.

Tom was my best friend at school. Although I would never have admitted it, Tom was my Platonic ideal of the Fifth-Grade Man. He was always smartly dressed and in touch with proper fashion, and his blonde hair was always expertly feathered back and perfectly split down the middle of his skull, but not, y'know, in a greasy icky way. In 1983, a certain demographic of mostly-heterosexual boys could use tons of hairspray and get away with it. That he was smart and confident with girls and had gone into the skating rink corner and swapped bubble gum with one of the hottest girls in our class elevated him to my superior in all ways.

I think he got away with wearing nice clothes and dress shoes to school because he also happened to be quite the athlete, and he could hold his own in a scrape. This was not true of me, so I was both a preppy and a pussy.

At that point in technological history, I got my music the hard way. I would sit and do homework or play within reach of our stereo for hours on end, listening to KZ 106, the local Top 40 station at the time, and a blank cassette would be sitting on Pause-Record. Anytime I heard the beginning of a song I liked, I would rush desperately over and un-pause, thus earning a copy of that glorious song. Unfortunately The Jammer didn't know how to STFU and would usually talk talk talk riiiight up to the first words of the song, and then the bastard would usually cut the song off before it was really over, but the imperfect science of the entire deal tended to make it all the more challenging to try and get the absolute best versions of the most beloved songs.

Mixtapes at that point in my life were based on the whim of luck and timing. I had no power over the ordering of the songs. I was a slave to The Jammer. Sometimes Laura Brannigan's "Gloria" and Naked Eyes' "Always Something There to Remind Me" had to go back-to-back regardless of how well they meshed sonically or thematically.

Between fifth and sixth grades, I "went" with four different girls. For reasons that don't quite make sense to me, I can't keep the chronological order of these "girlfriends" quite right, and I can't place them very accurately on a timeline. I don't even know how long I "went" with each of them. Two weeks? Three months? No idea.

Why did we call it that? Where were we going? Nowhere! We couldn't hardly even "go together" to the damn swingset, much less go anywhere else. (Sorry. A brief Seinfeldian moment. It has now passed.)

But I remember very specifically who I was "going with" in the spring of 1983. Her name was Amy Wall.

To Be Continued...