the Buzz for April 21st, 2009

21
Apr

 

Another relatively slow one out there this week, kids, but I reckon you’ll find a couple of can’t-miss gems in somewhere along the new release wall. To wit:

 

And now, a true story. (I think I’ve told a variation on this one before — too lazy to actually look — but it remains painfully relevant, so deal. I’ll try to keep it short.) Get the picture: 1990, junior high school gymnasium, eighth grade graduation dance. My first girlfriend Erin — yes, yes, this is a story from back in the days when I was straight as an arrow (and Erin, if you’re somehow reading these words, I’m so very sorry, but all I can tell you is, I’m feeling strangely expansive this morning) — have just taken a walk (in the school parking lot, natch!) and held hands for the first time, and all seems right with the world. For reasons I can’t now remember, she and I have gone our separate ways for a few minutes, she with her friends and me with mine — how very “Saved By the Bell,” agreed? — when, all of a sudden, OUR song begins booming through the speakers. (I call it “our song” because it was the radio hit that spring — nothing else even compared! — and because she and I both worshipped the tune, and because my first gift to her was this very song’s lyrics, painstakingly calligraphed by me onto a gorgeous piece of gold parchment paper which I had previously pilfered from Midge Lemley’s art class. (At our tenth high school reunion a few years back, Erin told me she still has those lyrics. And don’t feel too bad for ol’ Midge: she had demolished the one and only oil painting I produced in class that year by pouring black ink all fucking over it several months prior, so that crazy heifer owed me one.))

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