The Boy Wonder is feeling much better, thank you.   This was the first such illness in his memory (he'd had similar bugs when he was much younger) and he was probably more alarmed and scared than ill.  No one likes feeling so yucky and he was a trooper.


 

I was cleaning out a lot of old LPs (yes, it's true) and tapes the other day and came across an unmarked cassette.   I'm ever so slowly purging old music as once adored songs and artists lose their hold on me.  For a time in my youth I spent most of my disposable income on concerts, recorded music and music related print media.  I could tell you pretty much anything you could have cared to know (and more, most likely) about certain genres and artists.   Now I find that the baggage associated with a life I no longer lead feels heavier and heavier as the years pass and I'm more open to just hanging on the memories while allowing the material ephemera pass through my hands.


Anyway, I didn't recognize this particular tape despite years of similar semi-annual purges so I popped it into a deck.  Within seconds the familiar cords swept around me and, like Proust's madelines, took me back to a time that I had truly thought was lost to me forever.  Still night, nothing for miles...white curtain come down...kill the lights in the middle of the road and take a look around...And suddenly I am 19 again, in my first apartment and preparing for a night out.  Black tights, black skirt, black turtleneck, very high heeled black pumps.  Revlon's Raven Red on my nails and burgundy tint to my normally honey colored hair.  It doesn't help to be one of the chosen, one of the few to be sure... Lindsay's in the next room looking for her boots and the phone's ringing - it's Jeff and Ben wondering where we are and if we're ready yet.


And I started to cry.  At 35 I don't have too many - none, actually - of those kinds of nights out anymore.  Do I miss them?  Not really.  At least I don't think so.  But hearing the Andrew Eldritch and The Sisters of Mercy on a tape I don't even remember possessing brought back to me a part of myself that I've been missing, even if I hadn't even realized it. 


I wonder what happened to that girl.  She had great passions, read great books and had deep philosophical discussions with the thin pale boys she met at the 24-hour Rittenhouse Diner.   The Raven Red is long gone now, given way to a tasteful peachy pink and the Rittenhouse Diner closed its doors sometime in the mid-90s - I think the space is some kind of BYO bistro.  At least one of those shy skinny boys is an investment banker and two are school teachers.  Lindsay's a pastry chef and I haven't worn high heels since I had reconstructive surgery on my right knee in 1998. 


So where is that girl?  I guess she grew up, got married, started a business and had babies.  Hard to say.  Only one thing in this story is certain - she's hanging onto that tape.