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Plethora of Pop’s Rate-A-Record

Bobbie vs. Loretta

A Rate-A-Record Cover edition

Terry Barr
4 min readDec 29, 2022

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Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash

It was so cold during our Christmas with our children and granddaughter. I’m talking -7, with wind chills making it feel like -21. I can’t describe what that feels like, though I know some of you experienced worse over this past week.

Sometimes words are truly insufficient. You see words like “extreme cold” and you might wonder, but step on out in those high Virginia mountains to let your dog relieve himself, and come up with your own words for what it feels like to go numb immediately and wonder if you’re actually wearing any clothes at all. And wow, those hills are windy.

Still, we had great fun watching our granddaughter look at the pile of gifts she received and then still prefer to play with her grandmother’s glass case. There’s a lesson here about gifts and pleasure, but I don’t want to sound like a moralist or someone who’s wiser than you. Or you.

The hardest part of all for me was living for six days without my turntable (oh, so privileged I am). My son-in-law’s Christmas Spotify playlist was warm and embracing for the first three days, but I swear if I had to hear “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” one more time — by anyone, maybe excluding Lana Del Rey — I might have chewed on a glass case or…

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Terry Barr
Terry Barr

Written by Terry Barr

I write about music, culture, equality, and my Alabama past in The Riff, The Memoirist, Prism and Pen, Counter Arts, and am an editor for Plethora of Pop.

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