Pre-occupied with 1985 - Prologue

1985. Not the song by Bowling for Soup, but the real year - 1985. Particularly the month of June. I was there. I was 16 years old. We finally had a VCR. I learned to bootleg MTV. But most importantly, I discovered...

HEAVY METAL.

The genre that has way too many sub-genres now but back then? Very different.

Let me give you some background information first. I’m gonna back up to my birthday that year. I even have pictures.

For some reason of unknown origin, I was in the dumps about people not remembering by birthday. (Sixteen Candles, anyone?) I was being a typical sulky teenager. So my mom said, “Let’s order a pizza and you can go with me to pick it up.” (Mena’s Pizza Hut did not offer delivery then.) 

We go. I sit in the car, a 1984 Pontiac Phoenix (a car that deserves a blog of its own), while she goes in to retrieve it and the box is about the size of a two-car garage. She had to put it in the back. I’m surprised we didn’t need to put the back seat down.

Naturally I ask what was with the huge box and she said it was all they had.

Huh. Okay.

When we return to the house, I see movement through the back sliding glass door, which should be somewhat alarming because Dad was at drill (as always on my birthday weekend) and that was way too big to be a cat (even though Squeaker, our calico at the time, weighed about 20 pounds). I recognized the movement because only Robby Sanders could flit around like that.

So I walk in and like a jerk, say, “Okay! I know what’s going on!!”

Surprise party, LJ. Duh.

In attendance were my bestie Christine Cooper, Alena Lintag, Darrick Wilson, Shonna Lowe, Janna Liles, Wes Sunderman, and my “Lil Bro,” Rob Sanders. At least that’s who are in the pictures. If someone else was there, well, I’m sorry. Most likely the weather was bad (typical early February) or folks were out of town for the weekend. But it was a good time anyway. If you look closely, it’s quite obvious I was very much in preppy mode, with my button-down oxford and the argyle sweater vest. I don’t know whose haircut I was trying to emulate as this was the pre-Joan Jett shag years. I’m sure it was some actress/musician/popular girl at MHS. Simon Le Bon, maybe? I was not wearing makeup.

Anyway, this was the magic age of course, for any teenager. So I was learning to drive, albeit not well, and I was still listening to a lot of Tina Turner, Prince, Stevie Nicks...the only “rock” album I owned at the time was Van Halen’s 1984. Because everybody else did.

I was also in the middle of devising our act, Herky and the Xerkz, for the March of Dimes Variety Show. It was quite the lip-syncing extravaganza: Kicking off with Van Halen’s 1984, then the opening speech from “Let’s Go Crazy,” and after some heated deliberation, the main song chosen was “Wild Boys” from Duran Duran, which is suddenly interrupted by the guitar solo from “Firehouse”, (thank you, Eric Dodson), and ending with...sirens. (I still have this cassette mix, although the first part was eventually covered with something else at a later date. I don’t know if that was by accident or not.)

We had costumes, choreography, borrowed instruments that wouldn’t be plugged in, and even rehearsals. This was a fine example of how bossy I used to me, conning my friends and fellow youth group members into doing something completely ridiculous, because Rick Davis’ Goony and the Goonheads would not be on the bill that year, and we would be the most talked-about act of that Spring! There were several of us: Me (as the “Lead”), Rob (as Herky the alien, wearing Dad’s old flight suit), Tara Osborne as the girl looking for Biff, (Eric Dodson), who was abducted by the Xerkz and turned into a rock star. (Yes, that was the premise. We were nerds before nerds were cool and WE DID NOT CARE.) The other cast of characters were Suzanne Drager (unplugged guitar), Sherri Bates (unplugged bass), and Missy Langley (un-beaten drums). Back up singers were my always-present companion Christine and Shonna Lowe. Darrick Wilson was the stray goof-ball alien carrying a broom pretending to be the singer, or guitarist, or...whatever. It was geek mayhem. And it actually took a lot of work. And I, along with Rob, didn’t just instigate this ordeal, I also volunteered to appear as “Tina Turner” between acts for the daily shows for the middle and high schools. I used to do a pretty good impression. Still can.

The date for the show kept getting pushed back due to weather and was moved to some time in April. More time to prepare, but also more time to maneuver some big personal changes in my life. The first being the shift in my next big “this isn’t going to go anywhere” crush, and the second, the more important one, being my continuing disinterest in Top 40 Music.

The shift in “crushes” was really the catalyst for the shift in musical tastes, because the latest “crush” was a metal head. And as summer approached, a lot of changes were about to occur...

Stay tuned for…the REST of the Story….

AND HERE'S THE PICS!

Oh I Am My Mother! - The Final Edition (?) 2025

 And here we are again, in 2024.

I don't have much to update, except that we've made it through another year as mothers, grandmothers, etc.

Cheers to all. Enjoy!

In honor of Mother's Day, I'm posting the article I wrote that appeared in HER magazine, May 2009 (back story - it has been edited):

Good day, Younglings. Mother's Day is Sunday, May 14. And that's why this blog gets re-posted somewhere on social media EVERY YEAR since its original publication.

Read on, Padawans, and enlightened you will be:

OH! I AM MY MOTHER!

Oh, yes! I definitely am! And that’s perfectly okay with me.

People have always considered me a “chip off the ol’ block.” Some women would have flames bursting from their eyes if anyone told them this, but not me. My mom is funny, beautiful, and doesn’t take a lot of crap from anybody. I for sure got the funny part, because if I can make people laugh, I’ve done my good deed for the day. I’m still working on the beautiful part. That always took some work, because my mother couldn’t get me to wear a dress or makeup without great gnashing of teeth. She’s been accused of dressing up to clean house. I’m accused of having too many dresses and not wearing any of them.

When I got married, I instantly became the mother of four. Then there was a fifth, but that's another story for another time. I helped raised two of them on an everyday basis: girls, age six and nine at the time. I skipped colic, diapers, and potty training and went straight to slumber parties and tubes of lipstick left in the pocket of a pair of pants that got put into the dryer.

After a month went by, I called my mother and said, “I apologize for everything I’ve ever done.” I was in my late twenties, so that covered a lot of ground.

All five of these children are grown now; four have children of their own. This made me a grandmother at 31. (I could insert one of those shock emojis here, but I’ll refrain.) It wasn’t until I started hanging with the grandkids that I really noticed how much I was saying things like, “Scat, Tom!” when someone sneezed. I haven’t started calling everyone “shug” yet, but that might be a future endeavor.

I was standing in line at the local discount shopping mecca noticing the covers of women’s magazines, and thought, “Gee! I knew that in the fifth grade!” How? Because my mother told me. She knows everything, like the names of obscure actors all the way back to the 1930s. My children now ask me, “Who’s that?” when old black and white films turn up on services that stream old movies, like Tubi and Freevee. Nine times out of ten, I know exactly who they are, thanks to excellent maternal guidance.

My mom and I definitely have different musical tastes, although she did think some of Poison’s tunes were kinda catchy. (I was a teenager in the 80s, so...) Without her, I wouldn’t have Frankie Laine and Andy Williams on my Spotify "liked" songs list, right alongside Black Sabbath and Metallica. “The Theme for Rawhide” coming on right after “Iron Man” upsets the passengers in my car somewhat, but you know what? I really don’t care. “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin…”

My mother loves to read, and I remember frequent trips to the library as a child. She introduced me to Stephen King, and we both had extreme fears of Plymouth automobiles for a while. (Remember Christine?) I don’t know if that explains my sister’s avid interest in the film version of Cujo, but oh, well. If I had time, I’d follow Mom’s lead and join a book club, but I don’t think “Building Online Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom” is on Oprah’s reading list.

Mother-daughter relationships are complicated. Every woman knows this. Especially if they survived their teenage years and still have both arms and legs. Several films have captured the dynamic: Terms of Endearment, Postcards from the Edge, Steel Magnolias, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. (Hmm…three of those starred Shirley MacLaine. Wonder what that means?) Some women strive to be like their mothers, others…not so much. Who knows how the Kardashian's offspring will turn out. We won’t even mention Joan Crawford or the Octo-Mom. Maybe Shirley MacLaine could step in and line up everybody’s chakras.

I learned an entirely new facet of motherhood in 2021 when I lost one of my daughters, my youngest. There are no words to describe the devastation and the eventual emptiness the loss of a child can leave behind. I've known mothers who have lived this experience and now I fully understand. It's not a club one wants to belong to, nor is it a club that seeks new members. We'd rather you didn't join. Even though I wasn't there at the very beginning of her journey, I was there to prepare her for her final journey, that she was radiant, that she would "always be young, always be beautiful." That daughter was also a mother, and now as I watch her sons grow up without her, and remember my last moments with her, I realize that I, too, inspired her to say, "Oh, I am my mother!" 

And now, my mother is gone. On March 12, 2025, my mother went on to be with her Lord whom she served faithfully for all of her life. Her whole being was synonymous with the church, and I know she was welcomed with open arms by her mother, and her sister, and my father when she arrived. The end didn't go the way my sister and I had expected, but it was almost as if after my father passed last October, she felt like it was time to go, and then she was gone. This is the first Mother's Day where I won't go to visit, I won't make that phone call, and I will just have her memory, feel her spirit, see those "signs": a note she wrote I found among the things we moved from the house I grew up in, a piece of her jewelry, the many things she created and painted, a scarf she wore. What she was reading on her Kindle. The songs, the funny phrases, the ongoing inside jokes. I'm still trying to process it all; I'm in that other club, too, now. My mother isn't here for me to tell her the new things. But I have all the things that I've mentioned previously, the things that will stay with me always. 

In closing, regardless of whatever may have happened between birth and the day we looked at a stray digital photo and said, “Oh, wait! That’s a picture of ME! I thought it was my mom!,” one thing is certain: We are all shaped into who we are as women because of our mothers, no matter what the relationship may be. Some of us have spent every day of our lives with our mothers. Others were adopted, or separated from their mothers due to divorce or death or other circumstances. Be proud of those traits you’ve picked up, either consciously or unconsciously, and remember those special women on their day this month. Without them, you wouldn’t be reading (or listening to) this column, and I wouldn’t be writing it!

THANKS TO ALL THOSE MOTHERS OUT THERE!! YOU ARE LOVED!!