Call me crazy, but does your life have a soundtrack too?

My soundtrack probably starts with the jingle at the beginning of Mr. Dress Up. Back in the days when I thought Casey and Finnegan were real and my sister, Katy, and I had a pretend tickle trunk in our shared bedroom.

Then in 1985, the Movie, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun came out and as soon as Dad bought our first VCR a year or so later, Katy and I begged Mom every Friday night to rent the video so we could pull on our leg warmers, crimp our hair, and dance through the living room. Ok, I admit – I kept checking out my “amazing” dance moves in the window and believed one day, someone would “discover” me. My complete lack of dance training didn’t seem to matter as I fantasized about how SJP’s character and I would become BFFs and I would grow up to meet a hot teenage boy who danced better than Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, which I had only heard about, but never watched because of its “mature subject matter”.

Later, Garth Brooks claimed his slot on the soundtrack after countless Grade 8-10 (bench warming) basketball road trips when someone on the team would turn the dial on a ghetto blaster and we would sing along to The River, and then discuss how some of God’s greatest gifts really were Unanswered Prayers (as if we had any idea what that meant). Eventually, one of the girls would grow tired of our sad country songs, load her Nirvana CD, and we would all wail along with Kurt Cobain to Come as You Are.

Then, my life changed forever, or so I thought, when I turned 16 and passed my driving test. To celebrate my freedom and my entry into “adulthood”, I plugged my Discman into the cigarette lighter, cranked the stereo on Dad’s teal, four door, Ford Escort and belted out every single word to Mr. Jones by the Counting Crows. “We all want something beautiful, yeah I wish I was beautiful…believe in me…help me believe in anything…I wanna be someone who believes“. Now the words seem even more poignant than they did then, “grey is my favourite colour, if  I knew Picasso, I would buy myself a grey guitar and play….when everybody loves me, I will never be lonely. (more…)