track 23: my side of the bed / track 24: the end of the innocence

I graduated high school in 1991. After graduation, a group of my family and friends went to Bennigan's for some lunch. I had also had a graduation party at home one day. My mom gave me a word processor as a graduation gift. I had been writing stories since junior high school, taken creative writing classes and planned to major in English. At this point in time, I thought of myself as a poet. Some of my poems had been published in our school's literary magazine, the name of which escapes me. There are two that I remember particularly: One was about civil rights and incorporated lines from Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. The other was inspired by Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, which I had recently started to get into, despite having bought the first issue when it came out 3 or 4 years earlier and not liking it. (I was expecting a book about Hector Hall, the character who went from being Silver Scarab to Sandman in Infinity, Inc.) Eventually something I wrote inspired by his Mad Hattie character would actually get published in the letters section of Sandman. My word processor inspired a flurry of activity, short stories and poems by the dozen. Whether or not they were any good remains to be seen. (I just found a bunch. I'll tell you later.) Mostly, I think they would be decent song lyrics, especially since later my writing was influenced by music more than anything. From Hole to Natalie Merchant's lyrics for 10,000 Maniacs and even later to singer/songwriter Dan Bern, I tended to copy the style of others. I tried to find these two poems, but they aren't on my computer. Lots of later stuff about unrequited love and broken hearts, though. The funny thing is that I think I was always writing song lyrics and not poetry. I don't even like poetry!

Anyway, my other graduation gift was a ticket to see Don Henley and more importantly (for me), Susanna Hoffs. She had just released her first solo album, When You're a Boy. Having been a fan of the Bangles, although a casual sort of "I have their greatest hits and A Different Light" kind of fan, I was excited to hear her solo stuff, and in fact liked When You're a Boy better than either of my Bangles albums. For years, I only had the album on cassette, until last Christmas, when my brother tracked down a copy on CD for me. He had actually loved it just as much as I did, and already had it on disc. When I played it, I couldn't believe that I still knew it by heart after all this time. Don Henley was touring for his excellent album The End of the Innocence, which had been a pretty big hit for him at the time. For me it's another one of those albums that I knew was good at the time, but only really understand how fantastic it is as I grow older. It was such an odd pairing, but I guess they were both members of popular bands who had gone solo. And possibly had the same album cover designers?



There were four tickets and I was taking my brother, David, my friend Diana and her sister, Alex. Then on the day after my graduation, I cut open the back of my ankle. With a door. The door to our house was heavy and metal. When you opened it, you took a step up. I had gone outside on a rainy and very windy day. While my right foot was up on the step and my left foot was still on the ground, a gust of wind tried to slam the door shut and succeeded in slicing the back of my ankle open. We called my stepfather's mom, Wilma, who took me to the ER, where I got stitched up.

So on June 20, 1991, when we went to the Miami Arena, with it's insane amount of stairs- stairs to get in to the building and stairs to get to our seats in the stands - I was on crutches. I think my mom must have made a call to the stadium to find out what to do and when we got there, Dave & I were separated from Diana & Alex and went through the handicapped entrance. We then got to sit in the special area full of older guys in wheelchairs. I don't know why, but I always imagined they were Vietnam vets, but more likely, old hippies who loved The Eagles. One guy in a wheelchair next to us was smoking pot and I'm pretty sure he offered some to David. Who was like 12 at the time. The bright side was that we had an excellent view of the show.

While I never listened to much of Don Henley's other stuff, I remember getting Susanna's second solo album, Susanna Hoffs. It didn't grab me as much as her first, but one of the tracks, "Beekeepers blues" is one of my all-time favorite songs; the kind I will play and play again and again and again until I realize that I've been listening to the same song for half an hour. Now she and Matthew Sweet have begun making cover albums of songs from the 60s and 70s. Here are some good CDs. Also check out some of the MP3s, especially Susanna's cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Unconditional love" - a very underrated song!