Welcome to Stevieville

Okay, how’s this for weird?  Eliz and I are looking for makeup for our Halloween costume, so we end up going to 3 different Ricky’s (we probably could have found it right away at the SoHo store, but we were hanging out more in the Village, so we ended up running around to three tinier Ricky’ses).  While we’re waiting for the makeup girls to help us at the 6th Ave store (between 11th and 12th), I notice a short blond woman waiting in line with a little girl; she looks past me and I’m thinking, “I know who that is, but I can’t place her.”  Paul comes up and whispers, “The woman from Law and Order: Criminal Intent is here,” and I’m like, THAT’S who that is!  Eliz can’t get over how short she is, and I tell her all actors are short.  So we’re still waiting and Paul comes back whispering again. “Okay, how weird is this? Jill Hennessey is here too.”  I go “No way!” and look behind me at the line that’s stretched through the whole store.  I see a tall woman in dark glasses; if Paul hadn’t told me she was there I wouldn’t have recognized her, but I realized right away it was her.  So Paul goes outside because it’s so claustrophobic in the store, and as we’re finally getting our makeup, Criminal Intent lady meets up with Jill Hennessey and they introduce themselves to each other and chat about what their kids are doing for Halloween!  Incidentally, this is how we determined that it was actually Jill Hennessey and not her twin sister.  All in all, it was pretty bizarre.  As we were leaving I half expected D’Onofrio and Sam “Ol’ Piggy-Eyes” Waterston to come through the door.  And why was SVU not represented?  Even if Mariska was busy, they could have at least sent Ice-T.  Too weird.

Oh, and Eliz thought Jill Hennessey was short too.  BECAUSE SHE’S CRAZY!!!!!!

This was the first really chilly morning for me going to work, and just like I do every year I thought I should get a remote starter for the car, and as soon as I started imagining that it was a quick jump to picturing - ugh - snow. I wasn’t miserable about it all day or anything, but going back to work this year, especially since it was in AUGUST, didn’t make me feel like summer was over. The chill in the air today was enough to make me feel that.
SO I DIDN’T NEED THIS, DUANE READE!!!

I always swore I wouldn’t be one of those people who goes out and spends the whole night on the phone, but this is kinda fun. It’s also kinda annoying. I’ll finish this tomorrow.

Wow, tomorrow’s almost over already.  Last night we went to a Weird NJ sponsored party where for 25 bucks you get free White Castle roachburgers, Busch beer or diabetes-inducing root beer, two bands and a movie at the Williams Center for the Arts in Rutherford.  The first band was called Clancy’s Ghost and yes they played Celtic-ish music; they were okay but I missed their cover of “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” because Eliz, Gerardi and I went out to find a deli (somehow we decided the WCs weren’t adequate sustenance for the film).  My Paul wanted Twizzlers, but was shit out of luck because the closest thing to a convenience store was this creepy deli across the square, and the closest thing they had to Twizzlers was a bag of creepy black&white things called “Licorice Allsorts” that looked like it was hanging by the door there since 1922.  Got a bunch of candy bars instead, and even they tasted decades old.  Anyhoo, the second band was surf rock, which I danced to a little, but by the end they started “experimenting” with a theramin and we had to pass around the migraine meds.  The grand finale to the night was the film, “The Blood Shed,” a homegrown NJ horror flick that tries to be your basic inbred-hillbillies-are-funny-and-scary (think Two Thousand Maniacs/Texas Chainsaw/Mother’s Day).  The less said about it the better; there was nothing even mildly amusing or frightening about it.  The bottom line is it made “Mother’s Day” look like Citizen Kane.

A decent night out?  Yeah, up until the movie.  Worth 25 bucks?  Probably not.  But I did eat White Castle and not get violently ill, so I’m pretty proud of myself.

A couple of years ago I dreamt up this scenario: someone from the future contacts me in 1986:

Future person: In the future, you will have a device that fits in your pocket that can play music.

Me: I have that now (showing off my sweet cassette-player Walkman)

FP: No, this doesn’t play tapes, or CDs, it actually holds the music - tons of it - and is smaller and lighter than your current Walkman.  It’s called an iPod.

Me: Wow! That’s totally awesome! (imagine me w/ PJ Soles’ voice)

FP: Now, your iPod has 6500 songs on it that you have personally chosen.

Me: Yay!

FP: But there is not one single song by U2 or REM on it.

Me: Well now that’s just plain crazy talk.  I’ll bet you’re not from the future at all.

Lately they’ve been playing a fair share of U2 (esp. songs from Boy) on the Retro-Active cable station, and a week or so ago I heard the title track from The Unforgettable Fire on the radio in the morning, and decided it was time to get some U2 on my iPod.  (Incidentally, I had planned to upgrade to a new iPod but ended up just getting the iPhone, which I’ve barely put 1gig of music on.  I pretty much don’t want to have to deal w/ getting all my music onto a new iPod, since I haven’t kept it all on my laptop, so I guess I’m going to use the old one until it gives up the ghost.)  The LawGiver got me the first 4 and a half U2 albums (Boy thru Unforgettable Fire), so I am set for life where they are concerned.  Spent a couple of days revisiting a bunch of their songs, and I was relieved to find that I can listen to “Bad” again (the summer of ‘85 almost killed that one for me; there was no escaping it.)

Somehow this inspired me to make a playlist of songs I would have listened to in 1986, the year I graduated high school and started college.  I wanted it to be songs that would really evoke that time for me, never dreaming that it would be this difficult.  I discovered last night that there are 75 songs on the list already (!), but probably only a handful achieve that goal.  One that does, for example, is “That Voice Again” from Peter Gabriel’s So.  There are other songs from that album that I listened to far more often, but I’ve heard songs like “Sledgehammer” and even “Red Rain” in many different contexts over many years, so my associations from them are diluted.  “That Voice Again” is a song I mainly listened to right after I got the album (from my big brother, for xmas), in my room with the lights out.  So it’s got the spookiness I’m looking for.  Most of them don’t, but I’m hoping they will if they catch me off guard.  It’s not necessarily songs *from* 1986; probably one-fourth of them are from the ’70s, but I was still listening to those or just discovering them at the time.  For all I know I picked the wrong year, but ‘86 just seems to me the midpoint of a whole period of discovering amazing bands that I wasn’t hearing at home.

I still only have two REM songs on my iPod, so I guess they’re going to be my next acquisition.  But this project has led me to discover other gaps in my collection: I only have a Greatest Hits collection for Styx (”Greatest hits albums are for housewives and little girls!”), so no “Haven’t We Been Here Before” (I chose “Too Much Time on My Hands” over “Mr. Roboto”) and although I have a few Jackson Browne albums I can’t seem to find songs I remember listening to in that fateful year.  And I expected the list to be depressing, but the most represented artist on it is actually Weird Al Yankovic (nothing screams U68 like “One More Minute”).  Also up there are XTC and of course U2.  It’s funny how much I remember about which of these songs I felt cool for listening to (Joy Division, the Chameleons, the Church) and which I am still slightly embarrassed about (Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen - I actually put on a song from Born to Run because I don’t think I could stand anything from Born in the USA, but I freakin’ loved it in high school!).  There’s almost no 2-Tone because I can’t remember when I discovered it.  And so on and so on.  I figure by the time I’m through tweaking it I will be too totally sick of it to listen at all.

This was cool: I was listening to it today while Paul was at the gym, and when he came home the track playing was “Hot Summer Night” by Meat Loaf.  He said, “Wow, I’m wondering if I want that album on my iPod.”  LOL.

for my sweet favicon!  I feel so 21st century (and yet so 80s at the same time).  Now I just have to find some crap to blog about!

Oh yeah, baby. Got up at 10:30.

My cat just set off the Michael Meyers doll (hidden behind the couch somewhere) that plays the Halloween theme. That was creepy!