Big Thing

...now this is the most important, Rat. When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, put on side one of Led Zeppelin IV.

Good advice for the early eighties, but having attended college in the happy hunting ground currently known as BYU-Idaho back in the late eighties where we Bad Influences were outnumbered about 3 to 1 by Repressed Mormon Chicks Willing to Experiment, I, personally, discovered that side two of Duran Duran's Big Thing did the trick. (Ok, since it was a cd, and there was no actual side two, anything from track 6 and beyond was the good stuff). Couple that with a couple of Bartles & Jaymes berry wine coolers and I was scoring like Gretzky in an All-Star game. Good times. Good times, indeed.

As good as that cd was for me, somewhere along the line, I lost it. I guess somebody lifted it at some point, because I haven't heard it in years. But just last week I saw that it was available again on Amazon, shipped from Argentina, after having been out of print for over a decade. So I coughed up a couple of bucks and ordered it.

It arrived today, and I'm listening to it right now, and you know what--it still holds up even after almost 20 years. Of course, it brought with it a flood of good memories, too--Me and my roommates all racing back to the house with our dates after the winter formal 'Preference' dance so as to get a primo private room or one of the couches. (Preference was the one where the chicks had to ask the dudes, like an upscale Sadie-Hawkins dance, so you knew you were gonna get some lovin' that night...) But we had to race home like crazy lunatics in the snow and ice, get a bedroom and lock the door before anyone else showed up--Six guys, three bedrooms, two couches. The last couple to get to the house got the living room floor. Talk about some motivated college students!

Or there was the time I answered the phone and it was a wrong number, and I ended up talking to the chick for almost two hours, closing the deal sight unseen and having her come over. Lucky for me she was as hot as she was easy... She liked the cd a lot too.

But the problem with the Big Thing cd was that there was only about 30 minutes of music once you got to track #6, so you needed backup. Sarah McLaughlan hadn't hit the scene yet, but luckily Enya was getting hugely popular at that time, and that whole Watermark cd was chock-full of 'mood' music. So that went in the rotation, too. As a hat tip to the classics, I kept a copy of Ravel's Bolero in the mix, figuring if it were good enough for Bo Derek, it was good enough for me. And none of those chicks had ever seen the movie 10 anyways, so they just thought I was sophisticated. And, I'm ashamed to admit it, but some George Michael a bunch of Richard Marx ballads were kept on hand, also.

Ah, the good old days. If it were only so easy now. It seems that nowadays if I want to score some hot college-coed action here in Vegas, it's going to take a limousine, a handful of Ecstasy, and a stack of hundies. So I guess those days are far behind me. But for the fifteen bucks I spent on this Duran Duran cd, it's like I got the keys to a time machine. And the chicks that loosened up their buttons after a few sips of wine coolers back then are still around--they just want Cosmopolitans before they put out now, instead.

Well, that and a babysitter.

Mikey