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Back to school playlist
Heading On Back to School in 1971
Because my daddy didn’t have a cue to steal
Somehow being fifteen has been on my mind lately, and even before the all-knowing Buddy Gott issued this writing challenge for the good folk here at Plethora of Pop, I had been thinking of those early fall days of 1971 when school for me meant yet another chance to find a girlfriend or at least to receive my first-ever official kiss.
I wouldn’t get the girlfriend but early the next summer, I would get an evening of passionate kisses from a girl who, until that night, I’d never met before. Her name was
G*L*O*R*I*A.
Glor I A.
And I shouted it for at least two nights before she told me she had a boyfriend named Andy, a name I still to this day loathe.
I won’t name all the high school subjects I floated through, but in that season’s English class, I wrote my first ever Creative story. It was fiction, and it was based on a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs finds himself in hell confronting old Scratch.
So with this build-up, let me introduce you to me, circa ’71, in that oh-so-awkward boy-to-man stage where pimples compete with skinny-ribbed zip-up hippie shirts for at least someone’s attention. And please…