This year, the number one item on my daughter Clementine’s Christmas wish list is an iTouch. Unfortunately for her, there are two very large obstacles standing in the way of her actually receiving one (for Christmas or otherwise): first, there is the expense–last time I checked they were selling for slightly more than what I paid for my first car (granted, it was a 1979 Ford Pinto, but still), and secondly, there is the fact that I have absolutely no idea what an iTouch is. Upon hearing the second reason (she didn’t even blink at the first–she’s used to my cheapness), she rolled her eyes and said to me, “Mom, you really should try to get more hip.” I thought about that for a while, and decided that she was right–I did need to get hip–but I was damned if I was going to be told so by someone who as little as five years ago could still be caught singing along to Barney. And so I decided upon a course of action that would lead to both more hipness for myself and an education for my #1 critic: I decided to buy a record player.
My last record player died sometime after Clementine was born–probably from neglect. (For some reason, sharing a house with a demanding infant made the thought of carefully taking an album out of its sleeve, setting it gently on the turntable, and then slowly lowering the needle–only to have to do it all over again twenty minutes later–seem like an incredible waste of time. Go figure.)
Now, however, I decided that if I was going to be lectured about my lack of hipness by someone who didn’t know the difference between Iggy Pop and Ziggy Marley, then I needed more help than could be found in a box of CDs.
I needed a turntable; and so I got one. (The albums I had already; much to my husband’s dismay they have followed me through seven moves.) But then I wondered: where to begin? I looked through my stack of records: should I start at the beginning and work my way up? Where was the beginning, anyway? Finally, I decided that the only way to go about it was to begin at my beginning. And so, the very first record I played for Clementine on my new turntable was none other than The Wall.
At first I was a little conflicted about my choice; after all, Clementine will be starting Flagstaff Middle School next year, and that place already has a reputation of being something of a gulag. Did I really want to encourage her thoughts to go even further in that direction? Maybe, I thought, I should start her out with the Beatles–the “yeah, yeah, yeah” stuff. But then I did the math, and I realized that Clementine is right now exactly the same age as I was back in 7th grade when I first heard The Wall. (I remember it clearly because the dreamy 8th grader I had a crush on–Eric Sellers–played it nonstop on a three hour bus ride to Colossal Cave in southern Arizona. Of course, I also remember that that was the last field trip our class ever got to go on, perhaps because our teacher actually did have a “fat and psychopathic wife that would thrash him within inches of his life” at home.)
And I remembered one more thing about that trip–and about my crush–that made the decision as to what albums to play for her next–and what albums not to– abundantly clear. Unlike me, she would get to skip Poison, Styx, Vanilla Ice, and all the stuff that came with them.
True, it might not cost as much as an iTouch, but I looked at it this way: getting to experience the 80s without ever having to suffer through parachute pants? Priceless.