1982 Read Online Free PDF Page B

she was holding a joint. That’s the way Bowie did it.
    And Wendy had that early ’80s short haircut with the long straight bit in the front. It was totally David Sylvian. David Sylvian was the lead singer of the band Japan, and he had dyed-blond hair that was long in the front and short in the back. He was very serious. He would flip his hair back sometimes, but usually it was parted on the side and covered one of his eyes. And that’s the way Wendy had her hair, too. And David Sylvian got that from David Bowie. So, you see, Wendy was exactly like Bowie. And she was punk. Or, no, she was New Wave. Wait. No. Punk. Okay, I’m still not sure which. But she was almost seventeen. And she barely spoke to me.In fact, she barely looked at me. Wendy was my dream girl. Female Bowie.
    You probably know what I mean when I say that Wendy was cool. Or you think you do. You probably have an idea of what cool is. But there’s a subversive trick to cool. Cool can be fleeting. And what is cool in your head this minute might not be cool in a couple of years from now. It will stop being cool if it lacks substance, or if it has too much substance, or if it is a substance. It might also stop being cool if it becomes too popular. Pop success is often at odds with cool. But then, if you hang on, you’ll be cool again in a couple of decades. Longevity is another trick. Cool can change.
    Remember vinyl? Vinyl records were cool when Zeppelin put out In Through the Out Door in 1979. That album was so cool it had a few different jacket sleeves that you could colour. Then vinyl became near extinct as people started collecting CDs and throwing out their ELO albums. In the mid-’80s, vinyl records were seen as antiquated and inferior. Then, fifteen years later, everyone got iPods. And after a while, some people got tired of their music only coming out of tiny plastic rectangles with a digital list of songs. These people yearned for large black discs of music that they could scratch. And so now, vinyl is cool again.
    The same is true of eggs. When I was a little kid in the 1970s, my mother would make me eat lots of eggs. My mother would say that eggs were an important part of the daily diet. Then, in the ’80s and ’90s, my mother started instructing me to stay away from eggs because of cholesterol or fat or bird flu or something. She was not alone in this capricious attitude towards eggs. Eggs became so uncool that people started to eatonly the white bits. Some people went even further than that. In the ’90s, some people resorted to eating fake stand-in eggs with funny names—anything to avoid real eggs. But cool can change. And now my mother thinks I should eat eggs again. They provide protein, she says. Even Starbucks sells eggs, in elaborate Starbucks packaging. And Starbucks is cool. Or wait, no, Starbucks isn’t cool. But it was once cool. And eggs were cool and then not cool—and then cool again. Just like Joan Jett. Totally like Joan Jett.
    I have made a short list (or shortlist) of things that were cool and then not cool and now are cool again:
    vinyl
    eggs
    cigars
    SNL
    Joan Jett
    As you can see, this short list demonstrates that our idea of cool can change. But not Wendy. I knew Wendy would always be cool.
    Wendy went to my high school, Thornlea SS. She was an older woman. She was already in Grade 11. She was totally New Wave. Or punk. I was still fourteen and in the midst of a rapid transition from acoustic-guitar-wielding folkie—and ethnically inappropriate “Ebony and Ivory” duet singer—to aspiring New Romantic. I had been gradually building my black wardrobe for months to accomplish this mission. My skinny legs looked even skinnier in black pants. I had started dyeing and gelling my hair. Actually, I had started dyeing andgelling and then blow-drying and gelling (again) my hair. The colour of my hair would change every few weeks. It was alternately jet black or highlighted with blond streaks or, in one ill-fated stint,