Ok, I’ll admit it…I don’t actually have a Flashback Friday. But it sounded fun! Maybe I should start writing about a Flashback from my life on every Friday.
Anyway – today’s Flashback is brought to you by my Zune MP3 player and the band White Lion.
For whatever reason, we were recently talking about 80’s bands and ended up listening to some old White Lion. I enjoyed it so much that I went home and downloaded the album onto my Zune. Today I am listening to it at work and just laughing. I love old 80’s music so much.
The Flashback part honestly hit me last week when we listened to it the first time…but today while at work and listening to it…it hit me again, full force.
I had just turned 18 and was living with my boyfriend in Fort Worth in a crappy apartment on Lancaster. I worked right down the street at K-Mart…which was across the street from an old Fort Worth bar called Savvy’s. We drove by that bar all the time and I had always wanted to go in but was not old enough to get in. Now that I was 18…I really wanted to go. I just had to convince my overly jealous boyfriend to actually take me to a bar where another guy might actually…*gasp* look at me or something terrible like that.
Anyway – on my way to work one afternoon, a bunch of long haired boys who were unloading a truck of equipment into Savvy’s, started cat calling at me from across the street. They were yelling the most idiotic pick-up lines ever. One of which, I remember being “Damn! She’s got legs all the way up to her ass!”, at which, I wondered…”Um…as opposed to what?” Still…they were yelling and cat calling and whistling at me…which my 18 year old brain found quite flattering since they were obviously musicians and that was my thing at the time. If you had long hair and played an instrument, you were on my radar.
So I smiled and waved and they said, “Come see our show tonight! We’ll be here all weekend! Come see us!” They were all waving. I waved back and yelled to them that I would try.
That night I did beg and plead my boyfriend to take me there. He finally agreed. When we got ready to go he insisted that I was overdressed and that I should back off on my crazy 80’s clothing and that “nobody dresses like that up there…they all just wear jeans”. Well, I trusted him and just put on jeans and a cute shirt. HE LIED! Not big shock. There were girls in there in leather and way more outrageous outfits than I had wanted to wear. So that was “angry at him number one”. As the evening progressed, we ended up in a HUGE fight…and I basically told him he just needed to leave and give me some space and if he didn’t…I wasn’t coming home that night. He left.
When the band played their second set…I was alone at a table in the middle of the bar. They played a cover of White Lion’s “Tell Me”…and the singer, who had a wireless mic – which was actually unusually at that time for a bar band – was running around the room a lot. So he comes over to my table…puts his foot on my chair and leans right into my face and sings to me.
Well oh my goodness…be still my heart. I thought this was just the coolest thing that had ever happened to me and I was totally fascinated. He sang to me twice that night and I was just ALL about it.
After their set I came and talked to them…at which point, my boyfriend showed back up and we had an enormous blow up which ended in a break up. But that part of the story is boring. Suffice to say, he left. The next day I went back to the bar to see them play again and they treated me like I was their biggest fan. Over the course of the evening, they started singing a song about me because I squeak when I yawn…the song was called “Girls that Squeak”. Yeah. I ended up hanging out with them and then let them crash at my apartment that night. They left the next day and I never saw them again or heard from them.
But every time I hear “Tell me” or “Wait” by White Lion…I remember that night and how thrilled I was to get that attention and feel that “cool” on my first time in a “Heavy Metal Bar”.
Thanks for reading…this has been…Flashback Friday! Join us next week…when we will probably forget all about this great idea.
