I’d meant to do childhood photos and stories on Tuesdays, but once I saw this one, I knew I had to bump my definition of childhood to include my teen years.
This is a photo of a band that was put together solely to play at a science fiction convention. There were actually more members than this, but you get the general idea. Left to right, we have an alien from "V," "Road Warrior"-era Mad Max, Sandahl Bergman’s character from Conan the Barbarian (me! thin! with blonde hair!), and an astronaut.
Why, yes, this was in the mid-1980s! How did you guess?
So we played our set, which consisted of songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show along with regular rock songs with the lyrics rewritten to be science fiction-y. I have mercifully forgotten the specifics.
We finished up quite late and everyone was tired, particularly my boyfriend, the keyboard player (not shown in the photo). He was driving his mom’s van, and on the way home he fell asleep at the wheel, veered off the road and hit a light pole. The rest of us were following in our own cars, so we saw the whole thing and stopped.
Once the police arrived, they hauled my boyfriend to jail and towed his van. The rest of us dug out all the money we could find and headed to the police station to bail him out.
Keep in mind that we were all in full costume and makeup and it was NOT Halloween.
As I recall, the police officers we encountered acted as if there was nothing out of the ordinary when they saw us. I did wisely leave my sword in the car.
We managed to bail out my boyfriend and get home before it got too dreadfully late. I’m not sure why we didn’t involve anyone’s parents; maybe we did and I just don’t remember.
Anyway, this should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that my geek cred is well established. I even made that costume myself despite the fact that I neither sew nor do leatherwork as a general rule. In fact, I still have the leather gauntlets, later dyed black for use as heavy metal stagewear.
What was your flavor of teen geekdom?
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