It amazes me
how I can remember the words to songs that I first heard in junior high. In my
bedroom with my friend Susan, we would sing and dance and shake our . . . hair
as we imagined the Bee Gees asking us to come up on stage to join them. With a
stack of 45’s loaded on the spindle of my RCA record player, we swooned to Top
40 hits. Mom would yell at us to turn down the volume until finally she would
break up the concert and send Susan home.
The first
real concert that my parents ever let me attend was to see Frankie Valli and
the Four Seasons. They were playing in the Charleston Civic Center which was
the biggest building I had ever been in. Susan’s mother drove us to the capitol
city, dropped us off at the front door and watched as we excitedly ran to line
of people waiting to enter the show. She said that she would be back when it
was over and if we were not waiting exactly at this same spot, we would be
grounded for 3 months! I guess we did just that because I don’t remember
getting into trouble, at least not that evening.
Albums and 8
track cassettes began to take the place of 45 RPM records and I needed a way to
expand my collection. If I was going to be able to sing along with the girls to
the latest and greatest hits, I had to have many more than I could afford. That’s
when I discovered the Columbia Record Club! It seemed too good to be true that
they would send 10 albums for just 99 cents. Sure, there was some fine print
about buying 12 more for some exorbitant price, but that could be spread out
for months. Several months later, when I had not purchased even one album, I
learned one of those valuable life lessons about buying on credit. They may
still be looking for me because I moved and “forgot” to give them my forwarding
address. Oops.
Today I
looked at all of the CD’s that I never listen to anymore. My gift was to gather
up a couple dozen of them and donate them to the library. Surely somebody out
there will be thrilled to listen to Christy Lane or the Penguin Café Orchestra
or even Cat Stevens. And maybe somebody will remember these songs like I
remember the ones from the sixties.
In Giving
and Jammin’,
Robin
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