A Blast From The Past

Maybe I'm all alone in my observations, but I was walking through Michael's Craft Store the other day cruising the 75% off Christmas markdowns, when I realized I was humming along with the familiar music they had playing in the store.

The music from my generation, the fabulous 1980's...being played on an oldies station.

Then, Cyndi Lauper's All Through The Night came on.

Whenever I hear that particular song, it brings me right back to my high school P.E. locker room crowded around the mirror with a bunch of other girls, touching up our makeup and hair after Ms. Kemper's gymnastics class.

I had secreted in my Sony Cassette Player Walkman (doesn't have quite the same 'ring' as iPod, does it?), and was listening to a tape-recorded mix of music which I pirated sampled off the radio, by way of leaving a cassette in my Ghetto Blaster (what we called our Boom Boxes in our little town in Washington State...because, well, we were so, you know, hip) to record the more popular songs while I was gone.

There around that mirror in our cloud of Giorgio perfume and L'Oreal hairspray, some of the other girls heard my headphones and were saying, "Turn it up, Becky", "Like, this is a totally cool song" and somewhere behind me another girl commented excitedly as she leaned in to hear, "This is Tony's and my song" (to which several of the girls ahhhed in envy).

Ahh, yes. For that moment, I was the epitome of cool, having thought to bring my walkman. As we sprayed our big 80's hair to perfection, we listened. They didn't even seem to mind the poor quality of the radio recording.

But it was because of that garbled, poor quality recording (complete with static) that I never did get the lyrics quite right, and so would sort of just hum along where I wasn't 100% sure I knew the lines, sort of 'winging it' and hoping nobody caught on, because, you know, that would have been totally uncool to be caught not knowing the lyrics.

But see, I had a slight...problem. In our home, we weren't allowed to listen to 'secular' music.

Which meant that figuring out the actual words for my contriband pop songs was a little like the hunt and peck method of typing...it took a long time, and wasn't very efficient. We didn't have internet access back then to help us in our hour of need.

Needless to say, because of these factors, I never did learn most of the actual lyrics to songs from those days, and was often totally and completely in the dark about what they really meant.
So in Michaels the other day, I realized that I'd never quite learned the lyrics to All Through The Night right, and had no earthly idea what the song was about. All those years I just sang along, not even knowning what I'd been singing about.

So I tried to listen while I shopped.

All through the night was clear enough...

I'll be awake...and I'll be with you... Hmmm. Okay, maybe now I see where this is going.
Maybe that was why this particular song was on a secular station, and not the Christian one I usually listened to.

The song goes on to say something about a meter clicking, and it goes running all through the night.

Tell me Cyndi did not write an entire pop song likening, um, you know what to a cab ride? Can we say tacky? Especially in light of we have no past...

But the worst line is the whole, The sleep in your eyes is enough... What a pitiful choice of words for that line!

The meaning of the song, and even the very ambience of that song has now changed for me.

Since becoming a mom I've come to realize that 'sleep in one's eyes' is nothing...favorable, or in any way romantic. Mom's everywhere scrub their kids faces each morning, because nobody wants to have to look at eye crusties.

How in the world was Cyndi Lauper make it to the top 20 with such a song?

Oy. I must be getting old.

But I have to admit that it actually makes me happy when my own son picks up a few snatches to pop songs here and there (because he is not allowed to listen to secular music either), and he, too, is blissfully ignorant as to what these things really mean.

In a world that pushes kid to grow up way too fast, sometimes innocence, not ignorance, truly is bliss.