The Soundtrack to My Life: A Fascination with music videos

Summer makes me feel like a kid again. When I didn't worry about paying bills or trying to find my perfect match. My life was consumed with The Price is Right, reruns of Happy Days (oh, how I loved Scott Baio) and then our newest obsession, music videos. Before we had MTV, we had Night Tracks and Friday Night Videos and they showed after 10pm, only two nights a week. So each Friday and Saturday, my best friend Tina and I would prepare for our weekend of watching music videos. We made sure that we didn't sleep late so that we could take a nap in order to stay up all night to watch these magical mini movies. We LOVED them! Not only loved them but we were obsessed with them. Next, our snacks had to be in order. Dr. Pepper, popcorn, Nacho Cheese Doritos and of course big honkin' dill pickles. My mom used to treat me with buying the big industrial-size jar of pickles. We would take the leftover pickle juice and freeze it for later. Even now my mouth is watering thinking of that frozen pickle juice. Yum!! And last but not least, my jam box and cassette tapes. We had to be ready at any moment to record. You never knew what was going to pop up and we wanted to be the cool kids with the newest songs.

It makes me sad that people nowadays don't record music off the radio (or TV) like we used to. You had to have patience and a good trigger finger. You didn't want to get the DJ (unless you liked them) or a commercial. Sometimes it would take all day to get the perfect recording. But that was the fun of it. We sat around and waited for that one song. And when we got it, it was magical. We would then listen our newest creation for hours.

Back to the video watching parties. We watched every video and then memorized them so that the next time we could either do the dance (if there was one) or any move or gesture they made. We learned so much including that British guys were hot (thank you England for Duran Duran), a new outfit could make any dorky girl the hottest chick on the block (ZZ Top chicks were our newest stylists) and stalking was romantic as long as you wrote a song about it (Sting, I'm talking to you).

That is probably one of the sweetest memories I have from my early teen years. Our lives were consumed with those videos, the bands in those videos and of course, the teen magazines that featured those bands. I miss 16 and BOP.

I know for a fact that I had this issue.

And Rick Springfield is