Happy World Goth Day. And a Trip Down Memory Lane for TR.

I found out it was World Goth Day about 30 minutes ago and wanted to share that news, just because. No mention of anything goth-related can go without including this magnificent video. So first off, enjoy this:



When I was in college, I spent summers as a waiter at a very ordinary New Jersey diner. I came across all sorts of characters. Line cooks who couldn't read, illegal aliens working under false identification, fellow college kids who wondered why they didn't instead work at a bar/pub, women with many babies and no husbands, drug dealers, alcoholics and the like. It was a fascinating time in the underbelly of the very lowest end of the service industry.

I had a crush one summer on another waitress. Her name was Sheila and she was a college student who was a year or two older and much more NYC-savvy than me, which exacerbated that age difference, at least to my fragile 19 y/o self-esteem.

Sheila was a goth. Not a full-on character like the folks above, but the kind who shaved the lower half of her hair under her pony tail, wore dark-rimmed glasses before they were "cool," wore bright red lipstick, and spent a couple nights a week in NYC clubs like the Limelight.

Sheila was smart and cool and funny and we would have music debates all the time. She listened to my pleas that she dive into Phish and Widespread Panic, and politely dismissed them. She tried to explain to me the appeal of her goth scene. She invited me up to NYC to go to a club, but after an uneventful rave experience w/ Zman, Shem, Kyle and future dropout Garrett P in VA Beach in '92 (you read that right), I was hesitant.

In the middle of that summer ('94, I think), Sheila came up to me one day at work and told me she made a mix tape for me. This threw me off. Did she like me? It was the kind of thing a girl did when she liked a boy, right? The tape was littered with Christian Death songs. I gave it a shot. It didn't take, but it made my interactions with her all the more awkward, b/c it now seemed like she liked me. And I knew I liked her. And I knew I was driving a beat-up Dodge Caravan and was broke and was not anywhere close to holding my own in the goth/club scene. Conundrum.



At the end of the day (or end of the summer to be precise), nothing happened. I was just an emerging, underage party animal desperately trying to grow out my ROTC-mandated short hair in my 3.5 months home from college. The idea of hanging with her at Limelight to have a crack at a hookup/date was way too far out of my wheelhouse. It's just one of the dozens of "I wonder what would've happened..." memories* I have as I look back on my days as a young buck at the Jersey Shore. I miss you Sheila.




*Paul Simon captured this sentiment pretty well a long time ago:

If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white