Help! I'm Quoting Garth Brooks!

"And I was at Bloomingdale's this morning waiting on line to buy wrinkle cream, and this Jennifer-Love-Michelle-Sarah-Felicity looking thing bumps into me and says, 'Excuse me ma'am.' " - Grace Adler, Will and Grace

I went over to Zappagirl's house last night and became 18 again last night. And then I started to feel old.

This usually happens when I hang out with her. We both have a passion for 80's pop culture (an oxymoron?), whether it be cheesy new wave bands or cult classic movies. Over the summer we went to two of those multi-band reunion tour extravaganzas; one was loads of fun, and the other one was just embarrassing (for both the artists and the audience). The good one was The Psychedelic Furs/The B-52s/The Go-Go's...had an absolute blast. We missed most of the Furs set, but we did get to hear "Pretty in Pink" and "Heaven." Richard Butler still rocks, and it made me remember how excited I was when I got a copy of Mirror Moves for my birthday back in 1989. The B-52s tore the place up; I don't care how old they're getting or how much weight Cindy's gained...any band that can make me dance in the middle of a thunderstorm on a muddy lawn is OK in my book. And even the Go-Go's were good, even though I still want to smack Belinda Carlisle's Pantene-perfect hair.

And then there was the other show. The "Club 80's" tour, or as we dubbed it, "Club Old & Tired." All of the bands performing (Gene Loves Jezebel, Missing Persons, Flock of Seagulls, and Wang Chung) were simply the original lead singer and a bunch of young hired guns, looking to extend their 15 minutes of fame. Sad, sad, sad. But we were the only people on the lawn that knew every word to "I Like Boys." OK, so Dale Bozio has still got it. But other than that, we were more concerned with getting more overpriced tubs of watered down Bud Light.

(Yes, I swear this rambling does have a point. I'm just taking my time to get there.)

Lately we've been on a movie kick. You see, Zappagirl is in the process of building her DVD collection and calls me whenever she gets a new one that I'll want to watch. Two weeks ago it was This is Spinal Tap, which is a must-have for you DVD kids out there. The outtakes are almost as long as the movie itself, and the audio commentary is quite possibly the funniest thing I've ever hear (Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer do the whole thing in character. Heeheehee.)

This week, she called with an invitation to view her newest purchase.

"I just bought Rocky Horror."

I grabbed my keys immediately. "I'm on my way."

True confession...I've seen this movie waaaaaay too many times. For a good year, that's what my friends and I did on Friday nights. We were too young to get into clubs, and there wasn't a whole heckuva lot to do in Cincinnati in those days besides drink. (Come to think of it, there still isn't that much to do here but drink.) Every week we'd traipse downtown to the Skywalk and watch a horrible movie and yell obscene and sexually laden comments at the screen. Some years later I dated a guy who'd played Frank in the local cast; he told me the night we met, and I remembered seeing him years earlier. All I could say to him was "You looked really good in those fishnets."

Zappagirl was also a regular, but I didn't know her then. But we'd learned the same callbacks with the repeated viewings, and last night in her basment was straight out of 1988. We watched the damn thing twice (once with the New York participation track on), screaming obscenities at the TV all the way through it. (Incidentally, the Cincinnati callbacks were more obscene than the NYC show. Weird.) It was amazing how many of the lines I remembered. Just goes to show you how my brain works. I have problems remembering where I put my keys the previous night, but I can recite 95% of the callbacks from a movie I haven't seen in almost 10 years.

Halfway through the first viewing, I realized most people outside of my generation have never seen this movie and have no idea why watching Tim Curry prance around in a leather corset and fishnet stockings is so funny. Chalk it up to the changing times, I guess. To reluctantly quote the aforementioned Mr. Brooks, I'm much too young to feel this damn old.

Someone forwarded an email to me re-emphasizing this exact point. There's a college in Wisconsin that puts together a list to try to give the facutly a sense of the mindset of that year's incoming freshmen. Let me depress you with a few facts about the class of 2000...

The people who are starting college this fall were born in 1982.

They were born the year that Sony introduced the Walkman.

They have always had cable.

There have always been VCRs, but they have no idea what Betamax is.

Roller skates have always been inline for them.

They don't know who shot J.R.; most of them don't know who J.R. was.

McDonalds never came in styrofoam containers.

Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave.

They have probably never owned a record player.

They may have never heard of a 8-track tape. Compact discs were introduced when they were 1 year old.

Bottle caps have always been screw off and plastic.

There has only been one Pope.

They are too young to remember the Challenger disaster.

As far as they know, stamps have always been around 33 cents.

They have always had an answering machine.

They have likely never played Pac Man, and probably have never heard of Pong. Atari means nothing to them.

They've probably never seen a black and white TV.

They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era, and probably didn't know that he had ever been shot.

They were 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart. They don't remember the Cold War. They have never feared a nuclear war.

As far as they know, we've always known where the Titanic was.

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OK. I'm feeling ancient right about now. I'm going to grab my cane and shuffle on out of here. Hopefully I won't break a hip.