Wednesday, March 24, 2010
10:07 PM
All This and Disco, Too????
Saturday Night Fever started a disco craze that lasted through most of my high school years. In my lifetime, I consider the disco era to be the worst, most pathetic music period ever. I listened to it because that's pretty much all they played on the radio and I admit that there are a couple of Bee Gees songs that, for one reason or another, I still like but overall, disco music makes me ashamed to be a late 70's teen. Every freaking song on the radio was a disco dance tune and everyone in the world was trying to learn the dances from the movie. My sister-in-law at the time bought the special edition album that came with dance instructions, etc. She talked me into doing some of the dances with her. LOL We laughed a lot doing it but didn't accomplish much because she had very little rhythm and I loved her too much to tell her so.
Saturday Night Fever, the movie, was a blockbuster "event" in America. It was one of the few movies that my mom took me to see. She, Linda, April, and I went to see it one spring night. None of us had ever heard of John Travolta or disco until that night. I'll never forget seeing it for the first time or more importantly, our girl's night out while my brother was doing his ambulance driver thing which kept him away from home overnight three or four days per week. Those were innocent, fun times for us. Four generations of Y**** girls just hanging out, keeping one another company, and making memories.
As the whole SNF thing hit fever pitch, the popular guys at school started wearing the most sh*teous clothes imaginable. We're talking tight, polyester bell-bottomed pants in shiny colors, nauseatingly patterned polyester shirts that they wore open almost to their navel, and unbelievably tall platform shoes. Boys in high heels. Wow. As though the music wasn't bad enough, SNF turned every cute guy at MHS into a flamer. It was gross. I remember being so thankful when, during my senior year of high school, the SNF influence FINALLY began to wane and the school jocks traded in their polyester disco clothes for preppy, sporty wear. I have always loved all things preppy so it was a very welcome social and fashion shift to say the least.
*Related: The year was 1977 and I was in my first year of high school. That was one sucktastic year for me. I had been forced to leave my cozy jr. high (not that the jr. high years weren't their own kind of hell) and move up to high school, I dropped basketball from my schedule just so I could go home earlier because I hated high school so bad that first semester, especially, - my parents got a divorce, I went from an 8th grade weight of 98 pounds to about 130 due to a previous depressed summer spent eating my dark, frightened, scared feelings, and serious acne invaded every inch of my face. My best friend had just moved to Alaska and my next best friend got a job in order to save up for a car, which meant that she was almost never available to hang out anymore because she worked almost every evening after school. My mom started dating, my dad got remarried, a classmate was killed in a freak accident, Jerry Hull became my band director (a whole post about that creature coming soon), and my boyfriend who I was crazy about at the time, dumped me. We had to move from my childhood home to a cold, lonely apartment, and my dad gave all f my priceless childhood treasures away to total strangers. And if I sat here for a few minutes, I could think of more dung that rained down upon my head that year. 9th grade was one long, agonizing nightmare for me and the fact that I was able to continually talk myself out of putting a gun to my head during those dark, painful days is a miracle. I was miserable. So every time I see some reference to SNF or hear Bee Gees music, I am taken back to that time when the bottom dropped out from under me leaving me lost, lonely, broken, insecure, and convinced that life would never, ever be good again.
Me, January 1977
Taken out at Indianola, the morning Cathey left to go back to Alaska after spending Christmas break with me. Sad day, sad year.