Back to the 80s

And what a delightful Retro Week it's been.  Started off with Indiana Jones and Some Random Relic With Mystical Powers.  Which I would've enjoyed even if it was totally stupid.  Which I sorta think it was.

But, y'know, damn.  It's another Indiana Jones movie.  I am so the target audience for these things.  Waited in line for the second and third.  The second one (widely acknowledged as the weakest of the three) came out the summer I turned 16.  I waited in line for it.  Repeatedly.  Somewhere (in storage, most likely), I've got a box of the ticket stubs of all the movies I've seen from then until ... until the lid off the box broke, actually.  And the most folded and unfolded of them all is this orange-striped number from the very first time I saw Temple of Doom.  It's been looked at and refolded so many times, the ink has faded to near non-readability.  But you can still see the "5:30" theater personnel scrawled on the back in black magic marker, to make sure we didn't try to sneak into an earlier showing.  Couldn't tell you how many ticket stubs in that box are from the second and third Indiana Jones movies, but I'm sure it's double digits.  Probably in the teens somewhere.

Interesting factoid about me:  I actually wrote a letter to the Los Angles Times defending Temple of Doom against charges of it being too violent for its PG rating.  The Times cut my well-reasoned page-long defense down to a couple sentences, but did print it.  The letter came out the same day the LA Times printed lists of all A-students in LAUSD schools.  Actually had my name in the paper twice that day.

I digress.  Anyway, a new Indiana Jones movie -- with snarky dialogue and opportunities to watch Harrison Ford kicking butt and takin' names -- well, that just teleports me right back to those happy years where I spent summers watching the same movies over and over -- and spent time in school making up "quizzes" for my friends, testing our recollection of every wonderful scene.

And then, yesterday, as the result of a random comment a coupla weeks ago (followed by some eBaying on the part of Peggy's husband), I found myself at the Hollywood Bowl (with  my pal, Peggy), getting a second-hand high off the cloud of pot smoke, enjoying the reunion tour of The Police.  Never had a chance to see The Police in concert back in the 80s -- what with them annoyingly breaking up before the aformentioned summer when I learned to drive.  And, actually, I really didn't get into their music until I was solidly in college.  Insert here a flashback of my roommates and I swooning over the "Every Breath You Take" video.  Insert here a flashforward to the two blondes standing in front of me and Peggy at the concert, drinking many beers, and bouncing up and down with uncontrollable excitement when Sting first appeared on stage.  Oh, tell me I wasn't ever that bad.  Please?  Of course, we couldn't possibly ask the blondes to sit the hell down.  They were digging the concert in their own way, as we were in ours -- and just because age (well, not so much age as the sanity, limited endurance, sobriety, wonky knees, and the day job that all come along with age) makes my way of enjoying the concert a little bit more sedate (and, if I had my way, sedentary) than theirs doesn't make me want to rain on their parade any more than they wanted to rain on ours.  I'm finally seeing The Police in concert.  My inner teenager squeals, but it's my outer lawyer that can afford decent seats.  This is so cool.

And, OK, maybe Sting can't quite wail on "Roxanne" as well as he did thirty years ago.  Harrison Ford is keeping his shirt on a bit more than he did twenty-five years ago, too.  It doesn't matter a bit.  We're all here now.