Last Saturday night Jess had an epic 30th birthday party in the American Legion Bucktown‘s basement with Rory Lake hosting as entertainer and karaoke DJ. You might remember Margaret had a fewparties like this before moving to New York. I found Jess’s party extra fun becuase I lost some of my karaoke shyness over the past year or so because of all the singing I’ve done playing Rock Band. Rock Band and the $2 cans of beer they sell at the Legion!
Jess’s older sisters came in from Boston and Iowa for the party and made sure the Legion hall was decorated with embarassing (and adorable) old photos of Jessica. Some of her old friends from college flew in too. It was a good showing of all of her friends. Dallas and I were the party photographers and tried to get at least one shot of everyone there. We took a ton of photos so I just made this slideshow below. Fun fun fun night! Will be hard to top that one!
Found all this stuff when we were moving. As a teenager I had tons of posters all over my bedroom.
Few things to note:
The posters are almost equal parts of Teen Beat, Metal Edge, & cute baby animals.
There are lots of posters of the Coreys – Haim and Feldman. It is clear that I liked Corey Haim more.
There is a lot of Menudo, GNR, Def Leppard.
Neal Patrick Harris is looking about 10 years old (or maybe I’m just old now).
I loved River Phoenix.
There are only a few New Kids on the Block posters and there are many, many more heavy metal posters and glam rock (?) posters like White Snake, Poison, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue.
I have Skid Row posters and really was into Sebastian Bach. I even named one of our cats Sebastian.
There are posters of people I do not remember or recognize at all like Ty Miller? And Andre Gower? Chris Young anyone? Enuff Z’Nuff? Obvs their careers went nowhere.
Teen stars looked like babies next to the heavy metal guys.
I had packaging of brands I liked.. Exclamation perfume, A&W root beer. I’d hang this on the wall next to my favorite bands and actors. It occurs to me that this was kind of an old school proclamation of everything I supported.. like you do now on Facebook and MySpace.. but pre-internet. It was my Facebook wall… but it was a literal wall.
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I also drew and doodled a lot and would make little posters of things I liked.
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To incorporate all of this, my cousin Dawn and I made these notebooks where we’d write down lyrics and cut out pictures and paste them in. Kind of like scrapbooking before it was trendy?
