Bookey Bloggery

I didn’t go to a rock concert until I was a freshman, I think, at Hofstra. My floormates Lori and Sharon were aghast that I had never been to a concert. I also had never smoked pot. I still haven’t smoked pot, but I have been to a fair share of concerts.

Mod two-tone, eh?

My first concert was The Police during the Ghost In the Machine tour, in Spring 1982. This also marked me first buying cassettes.

Anyway, I don’t know where that Police shirt is. But my next show was the “final” Squeeze concert, also at Nassau Colliseum, where I went to see the Police. It was the week of Thanksgiving 1982 and it was their final show.

Except it wasn’t. By the time the concert started, it turned out there was another show the next night, AND, another show at some festival in Jamaica that weekend.

And then the group reformed in 1985 and I went to that concert also.

Last orders indeed. 28 year later, the group is still touring!

The funny thing about this final Squeeze concert was that the opening act was the English Beat. And opening for the English Beat was REM. Of course, back then, I had very little idea of the English Beat until the broke up shortly thereafter. And REM had that one mumbing hit in “Radio Free Europe.” I don’t even think they had an album yet.

The whole night was triumph for IRS and A&M Records. I went with my friend Ann, and maybe Mary, and a group behind us complained about REM. Then they complained about the English Beat, too. And then they complained about Squeeze. We wondered why they bothered to come. Especially the young couple that made out through all three acts.

And that is the story behind this collectible but probably not valuable t-shirt.

So… when you get to Junior High… if there are still junior high schools… you have to wear a gym uniform. And if I hated gym in elementary school, I really liked it even less in junior high. We were requierd to wear the Great Neck North t-shirt and either gym shorts or sweat pants.

I have a very vivid fall memory of me freezing my butt off on the track, outside on a chilly October morning. We weren’t supposed to wear sweatshirts or jackets, either. Just t-shirts. Whose idea was this?

In third grade, I had come to dislike PE so much that I always wore shoes on gym day, because you can’t wear shoes  on a gym floor. Just sneakers. Then, by January, I started to dillydally in the library. After our turn in the library, the boys were sent to gym and the girls returned to Mrs. Kravitz’s class.

Must-have PE fashion!

Must have PE fashion!

So from January to June, I successfully skipped gym. I was eventually caught by a fourth grade teacher with a weak bladder, who wondered who I was when I was on the wrong floor of the elementary school. Grades 4-6 were upstairs and she had never seen me before.

So, the jig was up. The coach had no idea who I was. As a punishment for both of us, I had to go to TWO gym classes in fourth grade. He was forced to remember who I was and mark my progress. This story reached a semi-legendary proportion, as kids in OTHER SCHOOL knew “about the faggot who skipped gym.”

I blame this on same-sex gym class. I didn’t really like gym again until high school. In the winter months, we had co-ed gym. The girls were far less competitive than the boys. So then, I took the gayer sports–fencing, vollyball, gymnastics, and badminton–all in this t-shirt. I was very skinny and the shirt was like robe half the time on me.

But in junior high, my attitude about PE reached the zenith of ennui. All I really remember about gym for those three years was freezing in my overly large mandatory gym uniform.