Can't hardly Wait

A teen movie I saw for free at a midnight staff screening in 1998 when my brother was working for Cineplex Odeon. I think I saw it with my friend Darryl who was a rabid JLH (Jennifer Love Hewitt) fan at the time (and I quickly became one as well! Although since listening to a few DVD audio commentaries she's done, I'm starting to think that she's as smart as a rock).

Why post about it? Well, I'm playing in this show at work in a few weeks and it turns out the keyboard player I'm in a set with played for a rival band back in the 80's and after a noon practise session we started swapping stories of back in the day. For some reason, I was reminded of this movie again, only because a scene it in kinda happened to me in real life way back in the 8th and 9th grades.

I was 13, it was 1982 and I was walking across the snowy football field of Emily Carr Middle School in my white winter coat (I think my parent's were trying to tell me something, white coat, winter, zero visibility = no safety, etc..) and I caught this vision of a girl, walking far in front of me in the blowing snow.
I could only see her from behind, between gusts of wind and snow, but from that vantage I figured that other angles were probably just as good(grin). She was going in the same direction I was so I kinda ended up following her (it's not stalking if you're both going down the same route). At some point she crossed the street and disappeared into the condominiums dotting the South side of Blackburn Hamlet.
Wow.. That was something. It was a Friday so I kinda kept that image all weekend. It was like a girl-mirage.

On Monday and Tuesday I didn't see her, but on Wednesday - Pay-dirt! And visibility was better. She had blond hair. I was a pretty recluse kid back then. I had just re-discovered the guitar and my best freind had moved to Nova Scotia the summer before. Plus I had these thick glasses and ears that stuck out so I had this kinda Beatles Haircut to go with the zit farm I was growing on my face(grin). So talking to girls was not a developed part of my skillset. Better to admire from afar, I thought, and I followed her on my way home. A few weeks went by, then I actually saw her face! She was one of the cutest girls, I'd ever seen, well worth the wait(it's odd to think about some girl you don't know for weeks and never having seen her face). She was horsing around after school trying to stuff a snowball down this guy's coat I knew. Lucky &%$*&. He could be a bit of a jerk, but when you're 13 that makes you cool or something(grin). I had to stall until she hefted her Adidas bag(we all carried these god-awful things) and walk home about 80 feet behind her. I never crossed the street to she where she lived. That'd just be creepy..

A few months later near the end of the school year a freind caught me staring at her again and actually told me her name. It was Beatrix(name changed to protect the Innocent). It became my favorite name. So the end of the school year was approaching, we had a graduation dance that you get in GR 8 before they throw you to the lions (high school, GR9-GR13), I'm in my bad suit and tie, actually out on the dance floor because some other girl I didn't really like had asked me to slow dance (easy enough concept to grasp, no way was I doing fast dancing stuff though! I'd look like a dork!) and I kept looking for this Beatrix girl. Every time I saw her she was dancing with someone else. A fast song would start and most of us guys would leave the gym floor and go back to holding the walls of the gymnasium up, venturing back out only when a slow song would come on. I think I danced about every slow song with a different girl, with one or two repeats, and by the end of the night I finally bumped into her. She didn't know who the hell I was, but I asked her to dance and she said yes.

And boys and girls.. It was Stairway to Heaven, (forever immortalized in that Bare Naked Ladies song). Eight minutes of slow dancing, even through that weird heavy part at the end after the guitar solo....

What I remember most is that she kinda smelled of sweat (guess she'd been dancing a lot). But she had some kinda perfume on that was great, and here I was actually slow dancing with this creature from the snow mirage several months ago and my freinds are giving me the thumbs up behind her back and all that. Before I knew it, it was over, she said thanks, I croaked something, the lights came on and I got the hell off the floor lest I make a dork of myself (which I probably did by taking off anyhow).

And that was it for the summer. I cut her picture out of the yearbook and carrried it around in my mostly empty wallet like a dork all summer. Someone had told me she was from Indonesia and when I'd play Risk(that game with the map where you occupy different countries) with Darryl I'd lose because I'd throw all my forces at Indonesia! I had to control Indonesia! It was a dutch colony wasn't it? Full of beautiful blond-haired blue eyed girls named Beatrix! (Ha Ha said Darryl, as he crushed me with his vast armies in Australia!).

So that's just some of the background to what happened next.

To be continued....