The mental Wayback Machine
First, an amusing (at least to me) observation: I remember when Jordache and Sasson were the must-have jeans I couldn't afford. Now they're sixteen bucks at Walmart, and a single pair of 6-long Levis is the Holy razzmfrazzm Grail.
FOUR stores, no luck. Though I did discover at the fourth one (Dress Barn! Who knew?) that Seven7 (a) runs long anyway, and (b) cuts a good fit for me. Better yet, $50 jeans on sale for $15. Score! But still only one pair, and I have several that are falling apart.
Next, not as far back in the Wayback, but more layered and elusive: In the process of getting back into an appropriate headspace for the FKFicFest, I've been listening pretty continuously to the music I was most into when FK was on the air. I need to pull my cassettes out from under the spare room bed and refresh my memory as to what I don't have on CD (and therefore don't have on my Zen) of what I was listening to a lot. Especially first season, when my fic-in-progress is set, I still listened to cassettes probably 2/3 of the time. If not more, since that was all I could play in the car, and I had an Evil Commute.
Lauren Christy is obvious, though it was second season when I discovered her. Remember when you caught the tail end of something on the radio and might not track down what it was for weeks? That happened with "Color of the Night" (which of course spawned the fic of the same name) three times before I finally caught the artist's name. These days I'd just google a few phrases of the lyrics and have the song downloaded from Amazon five minutes later!
The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1991 concept album (a/k/a Frank Wildhorn Discovers Waltz Time -- remember that one?) has a whole labyrinth of fannish associations, in part due to the labyrinth of revisions to the show! The concept album throws me right back to randomly bursting into the chorus of "The Riddle" with susanmgarrett in the middle of the dealer's room at Toronto Trek in '94, with Nigel at his autograph table at the end of the aisle looking at us like we were nuts (which he pretty much already knew). Can't get much closer to the midst of my immersed-in-FK headspace than that.
Kate Bush's The Red Shoes was long-awaited, and I obsessed as much about hunting down her associated short film, The Line, the Cross, & the Curve as about getting the Canadian cuts of FK eps. Which reminds me, I should really convert TLTC&TC to DVD before it goes bad. Though of course someone does have it on YouTube, and I'm sure it's on the torrents somewhere. Once again, something we couldn't have conceived of, back when I danced with delight on finding said film on the briefly-in-print pro VHS, and was Patient Zero on the tape tree for the coveted FK season 2 gag reel. (And no, I'm still not putting in print on the internet how we got it, even though you can see it now on the DVDs. *g*)
Speaking of Kate, someday maybe I'll still do that "Love & Anger" vid for Nick & Nat...
Other jogs down memory lane with less specific associations... The '95 Jekyll & Hyde concept album, Linda Eder's first couple solo albums, Rick Springfield's Tao and Rock of Life.
And of course FK and Phantom of the Opera were concurrent most-obsessive-at-the-moment fandoms, with the London cast album the very first CD I bought, and in frequent play for years on end. Not to mention the fact that two of the seven times I've seen the show were in Toronto -- the first on my first visit to the city in '89, the last with amilyn during the '94 TTrek trip, when we went to Stilife (the first-season location for the Raven) after the show. The two fandoms are tangled in my head at all kinds of points I'm probably not even thinking of right now!
FOUR stores, no luck. Though I did discover at the fourth one (Dress Barn! Who knew?) that Seven7 (a) runs long anyway, and (b) cuts a good fit for me. Better yet, $50 jeans on sale for $15. Score! But still only one pair, and I have several that are falling apart.
Next, not as far back in the Wayback, but more layered and elusive: In the process of getting back into an appropriate headspace for the FKFicFest, I've been listening pretty continuously to the music I was most into when FK was on the air. I need to pull my cassettes out from under the spare room bed and refresh my memory as to what I don't have on CD (and therefore don't have on my Zen) of what I was listening to a lot. Especially first season, when my fic-in-progress is set, I still listened to cassettes probably 2/3 of the time. If not more, since that was all I could play in the car, and I had an Evil Commute.
Lauren Christy is obvious, though it was second season when I discovered her. Remember when you caught the tail end of something on the radio and might not track down what it was for weeks? That happened with "Color of the Night" (which of course spawned the fic of the same name) three times before I finally caught the artist's name. These days I'd just google a few phrases of the lyrics and have the song downloaded from Amazon five minutes later!
The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1991 concept album (a/k/a Frank Wildhorn Discovers Waltz Time -- remember that one?) has a whole labyrinth of fannish associations, in part due to the labyrinth of revisions to the show! The concept album throws me right back to randomly bursting into the chorus of "The Riddle" with susanmgarrett in the middle of the dealer's room at Toronto Trek in '94, with Nigel at his autograph table at the end of the aisle looking at us like we were nuts (which he pretty much already knew). Can't get much closer to the midst of my immersed-in-FK headspace than that.
Kate Bush's The Red Shoes was long-awaited, and I obsessed as much about hunting down her associated short film, The Line, the Cross, & the Curve as about getting the Canadian cuts of FK eps. Which reminds me, I should really convert TLTC&TC to DVD before it goes bad. Though of course someone does have it on YouTube, and I'm sure it's on the torrents somewhere. Once again, something we couldn't have conceived of, back when I danced with delight on finding said film on the briefly-in-print pro VHS, and was Patient Zero on the tape tree for the coveted FK season 2 gag reel. (And no, I'm still not putting in print on the internet how we got it, even though you can see it now on the DVDs. *g*)
Speaking of Kate, someday maybe I'll still do that "Love & Anger" vid for Nick & Nat...
Other jogs down memory lane with less specific associations... The '95 Jekyll & Hyde concept album, Linda Eder's first couple solo albums, Rick Springfield's Tao and Rock of Life.
And of course FK and Phantom of the Opera were concurrent most-obsessive-at-the-moment fandoms, with the London cast album the very first CD I bought, and in frequent play for years on end. Not to mention the fact that two of the seven times I've seen the show were in Toronto -- the first on my first visit to the city in '89, the last with amilyn during the '94 TTrek trip, when we went to Stilife (the first-season location for the Raven) after the show. The two fandoms are tangled in my head at all kinds of points I'm probably not even thinking of right now!