Hello beautiful people. I am going to go ahead and tell you all right now, this one is literally just me showing my age and not apologizing for it. That was your trigger warning kids. I’m about to “back in my day” and “remember when” the fuck out of this shit.
I want my MTV! Actually, what I want — and miss — are really great music videos. I miss when MTV actually played music. A cool music video could make you go from kinda liking a song to freakin’ loving it.
I know they still have music videos, and some of them are pretty good. I love the video for “Petal” by Arianna Grande, for instance. But it just ain’t the same.
Do kids today get rewarded with getting to watch a music video in class if everyone passed their TAAS test? We did. We studied harder just for the chance to watch Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video … in class! It sounds dumb through the eyes of adulthood, but a single slice of pizza, a little Dixie cup of Coca-Cola and “Thriller” playing on that big-ass television that they would roll into the classroom for special occasions — that’s one of my fondest memories from childhood.
We would rush home after school to watch MTV’s video countdown. We would watch the same videos over and over — even the ones we hated, because we couldn’t fast-forward through the shitty ones to get to the ones we liked. I fucking hated the video for “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, but I know I have watched it at least a thousand times because there was a chance that Madonna’s “Into the Groove” might play after.
We were obsessed with and addicted to MTV.
Speaking of music … God, I miss music stores! I miss Tuesdays being new release day and spending hours flipping through vinyl records, cassettes and CDs. I miss the days when random artists like The Thompson Twins, Taylor Dayne or Poe would show up to a music store to sign autographs. I miss having physical copies of music.
You could always tell a lot about a person based on which CDs were in their collection. In my case, my music collection said “Big Homo. Big flaming gay bird.”
I have a photo of me as a teenager, and you can see my wooden cassette holder mounted to the wall behind me. And you can clearly see that every single artist was a girl: Madonna, Debbie Gibson, Samantha Fox, Stacy Q. The only male artists I had were Wham or George Michael. But, you know — Flaming!
I miss gay bars from way back in the day. I miss the new feeling of going out and feeling like you finally found a place you belong. Not just in the bars, but just being in the Oak Lawn Gayborhood felt special. Back before cell phones and Grindr. There was a feeling of “us-vs.-them” that made us appreciate the time we could be around others like us.
I still love our Gayborhood, but sometimes it’s a little scary. Fights and full-on brawls out in the streets make it feel, I don’t know, less? I miss when our world felt smaller, even though back then we bitched about wanting more and being more accepted.
Be careful what you wish for.
Now I don’t want to give the impression that everything was better back in the day, because it wasn’t. I do not miss people being able to smoke indoors, especially in the clubs. I do not miss opening your drag bag after a show and it smelling like a dirty ashtray. Every wig or costume stank after about 10 minutes in a club. The smell permiated every fiber of your being.
I do not miss getting burned by some careless flailing homo with a cigarette on the dance floor. That was my biggest pet peeve, and the cause of two of the five fistfights I have had.
I do not miss the near constant loss of beautiful young gay men. You’d be on the dance floor with friends, having the best time, then two weeks later you’d find out that one of them was gone, and y’all would never dance together again. That fucking sucked. I do not miss that.
Nostalgia is a crazy thing. It can sometimes blind you with a feeling of happiness for what used to be, but then it will turn around and kick you in the balls with a triggered memory that breaks your heart all over again.
I miss the ignorance of youth. I miss not being jaded and feeling every emotion so deeply. Getting older sometimes feels like you are just collecting scars and callouses for protection, to keep you from ever feeling things the way you once did. But then you catch yourself bawling over the smallest, most random thing — like a memory or a smell or a single line from Ted Lasso that triggers that lump you get in your throat when you are trying not to cry.
It actually makes me feel a little psychotic.
So basically, I’m old. I miss some things about the olden days. Everything hurts. Get off my lawn. Blah, blah, blah.
You older folks know exactly what I am talking about, and you young people — you will know soon enough. (Maniacal laugh!!!)
Remember to always love more, bitch less and be fabulous! XOXO, Cassie Nova.