i was a teenage clubkid

Music: David Sylvian: Secrets of the Beehive (2003)

A lost but found best friend from my high school days emailed me to report that the one-time playground of our youth, Plastic, now has a community page on facebook. Plastic was a dance club that catered to a goth/industrial/techno-kid jet-set. When not doing drugs in a basement somewhere, my friends and I often ended up at this club. Plastic, however, was the second-best to my first club of love, Boys and Girls. Boys and Girls was a more grown-up version of Plastic, a poly- and ambisexual bar that I started going to when I was 14; these were the days when carding was, um, not taken that seriously. I cannot believe I'm old enough to remember that, but yup: carding used to be a joke. Anyway, when carding started to be an issue the state closed down Boys & Girls. A year later the same owners opened Plastic, and it wasn't until about a year after that until they got their liquor license. Us "old timers" (hah!) got our underage drinking again, but if you were a new face, tough. You had to do coke instead.

What has me amused to no end about the Plastic group---aside from bringing back a flood of mostly happy memories---was that someone managed to photograph me. Understand between the age of 14 and 20 I would not agree to have my photograph taken, I mean, I was a real jerk about. The only extant photos from this period are year book photos, which I reluctantly agreed to, and a handful of various candid shots for high school year books. So here is, my friends, the only extant social photo of me, to my knowledge, at 16-17 years of age.

Ah, if one could only retain such a girlish figure . . . and a tolerance for hour-long hair-do sessions. They don't make the stuff you used to get your hair like that anymore. You have to settle for non-CFC Aqua-Net these days.

Looking at us teen "club kinds" from back then, I recalled my favorite songs from that era: Nitzer Ebb's "Join in the Chant," Renegade Soundwave's "Cocaine Sex," Front 242's "Headhunter," Eon's "Spice," and Professor X's "Professor X Suite." Fun times, long before mortgages and car repairs and water damage and debt. Click the photo for a bigger version.