rock n roll bride

I married a rock n roll bride once. It was the summer of 1988, and big hair was in style. I had big hair, bigger than most, yet never quite big enough.

It was the summer before vinyl tank tops with the down-the-back zippers came into style, but right after the phase where do-it-yourself tattoos were all the fashion.

Our eyes first met at a disco, one of those happening places where you swear that almost every girl was Madonna and almost every guy was Sean Penn. I had just finished my shift playing Sean Penn, and the manager winked as I left the dressing room. He was always hitting on me, but this was in the period before that kind of thing became trendy. Sure, there was a time when a wink from your boss was something everyone talked about, but I was too busy talking about the IBM PC Jr.

Sure, I was a nerd when we were just recovering from the set-back of that horrible sequel. Revenge was still in our hearts, but fighting spirit just wasn't in me. Until that night.

She caught my eye from across the floor. Actually, she caught my car keys, the ones a few dancefloor bullies had grabbed from me and jeeringly kept away from me. An erant throw landed them in her hands, and landed her eyes on me, and landed me in the path of a roaring locomotive that I only narrowly avoided being run down by, dusting myself off in time to catch her name and my keys that she threw back at me.

To say I was smitten would be completely missing the point. I was in love. She was the one for me, if there was ever one standing in for the one that should have been. No, she wasn't a stand-in, body double for my true love. She was the true McCoy. I couldn't have pictured her more beautiful if she had been the Mona Lisa, painted by someone who could paint.

She told me about twenty minutes later, as we told stories about the good times we had together, that when we first met, she didn't think there was any chemistry between us. Someone asked her what it was that finally drew me to her, and she mentioned it might have been that annoying steel cable attached to the keys and that I slowly reeled in. When asked why she didn't just let go of the keys, she said that someone she saw the romance in the situation, and she knew she couldn't ruin the moment.

Fortunately for her, those bullies were doing quite fine with the whole moment ruining, and for the first 5-10 minutes of our courtship, she had ringside seats to seeing me treated like a fool by those brutes. If I hadn't been distracted by her beauty, I might have had the courage to stand up and run away. But all I could do was stare at her dumbfounded and have my undewear wedgied.

If I had known at the time that she was a rock and roll girl, I would have known from the start that she was out of my league. For I was still just a disco boy. My allegiance to ABBA and the Bee Gees was absolute. My roller disco days were just one week before. And I was not ashamed of my esteem for Erik Estrada. But to have known that she was from that other world, no, that would have crushed all last remains of hope.

Perhaps it was the Billy Joel tune I mindlessly hummed, something I had heard in the changing room, but didn't quite know anything about, or maybe it was just the way I wore my butterfly collars, but she somehow took to me. In between the taunts from the bullies, she asked if I came here often, and I admitted I worked here. Her eyes lit up, thinking that perhaps I was part of the illusive back-stage crowd and would lead her into the secrets that lay within.

It was 10 minutes later, after we agreed that things weren't going to work out, that she fully realized how far from music royalty I was. How far from musical taste I really was. It was something she wrote about years later on page 24 of her 5 volume autobiography, that somehow she knew, that no matter how small in real life I was, that in many ways, I had the most profound impact on her life. That somehow, in one small acquaintance, she had learned that women were more her thing, and that men were better off left on the dance floor where they belonged.

Most people would say that she was cooler than Jesus. Others would say she was too cool for her own good. I don't know my cool from my lukewarm, but I do know that those 30 wonderful minutes were like an hour, stretching on into the sunset like a bus ride from my parents house to the house of a girlfriend I would meet 2 days later at IHOP. While I may not have actually married that rock n roll bride, I do know she changed my life. I will never forget you.