Lip Synch Therapy

Heh, welcome to Spider-Girl's blogging therapy session of the day.....

I've been thinking this week about a memory that alternately makes me smile with pride and wince with remembered embarrassment. It's taking me back to those teenage years when I felt like the most awkward, least glamorous girl on the planet.

Of course, I think two of my dearest friends felt like that at the time too. Maybe everybody did at that age. Gee, I hope it wasn't just us. :)

We were fifteen years old and were certifiably geekalicious at the time. Well, all the "cool" (mean, snobby, secretly insecure I hope-types) kids certified us thusly anyway and reminded us of it on a daily basis. We were sick of it.

(By the way, it is one of the little joys in my life that looking back on photos from that era you cannot tell the popular kids from the nerds. We all have uniformly bad hair and clothes. It was the Eighties.)

But, anyway, back to my teen angst: what could we do do to break out of nerd-dom ?

When an airband contest was advertised at our junior high school, we decided that here was our opportunity to take a chance at rock-and-roll glory. It would be fun. It would be daring. It was not something nerds would do, we felt.

Of course, this was unfamiliar ground.There was a strong possibility that drawing attention to ourselves could bring a fresh round of teasing down on our heads.

My co-rockers shrugged. How could it get any worse? We were already used to being the butt of jokes.

My own casual shrug was not totally sincere. I wanted to do this thing and show no fear, and yet....oh, I could imagine disastrous social consequences.

Now, there are some songs that take you back to a certain time and place, whether you like it or not.

For me and my two childhood friends, the song that takes us back to semi- traumatic glory is The Final Countdown by Swedish rock-group Europe, apparently even now an Anthem for the Ages: http://www.nassauweekly.com/view_article.php?id=441

We're leaving together
But still it's farewell
And maybe we'll come back
To earth, who can tell
I guess there is no one to blame
We're leaving ground (leaving ground)
Will things ever be the same again
It's the final countdown... The final countdownOoh oh

Even today, my friend's husband sometimes makes this tune his cell-phone ring tone to tease her.

Why we chose to imitate an all-male band with five members when there were only three of us girls ,I cannot quite recall.....but after weeks of fierce practice in my basement, there we were...on stage in front of the entire school.

I already had the big awful unruly permed hair that eighties rocker bands favoured. We wore our acid-washed jeans and our denim jackets and tied those little bandanna rags around our legs that were fashionable at the time, and lip-synched our little hearts out.

Being nerds could be useful. We utilized all our resources : I played the keyboard, one of us was on drums, and our lead-singer rocked out with an electric guitar, all borrowed with blessings from the school band-room.

And, as the piece de resistance, one of our teachers donated a projector to set up in the background which played a film of a rocket-ship taking off and planets whirling past. It was heady stuff.

It still makes me cringe a little to think of us out there, pretending to wail along to "Ooooh.....Ooooh...it's the final countdown! Ooohhh!"

Okay, I still cringe a lot.

But the important thing was that we didn't totally suck. The audience cheered as we bowed and waved at the end of our song. Well, they would probably cheer anything keeping them in the school auditorium and out of the classroom, but still it was exhilarating .

We were disappointed that we didn't win the contest of course, but in all honesty there were better entries than ours---drat that Evil Tara and Her Cohorts who danced and lip-synched with perfect choreography through Julie Brown's Will We Make It Through the Eighties?

We did make it through the Eighties in the end, and strangely enough, nobody ever teased us about our musical debut either.