January 22, 2007

Don't say you'll stay cuz then you'll go away

I am talking about the writer/reader connection. I am thirteen years younger than Rob Sheffield, author of the memoir Love is a Mix Tape, but I think we bookended the same formative years. He gets sentimental for the 1990s, and I knew I’d like his book. But then. He’s waxing nostalgic. He notes, “On 90210, Dylan and Kelly were making out on the beach to ‘Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover”. That’s what I’m talking about, because I was watching. It was the year the 90210 season ran into summertime, and Donna and Brenda went to Paris while Kelly stayed home to steal Brenda’s boyfriend. But not steal, exactly, because they were meant to be. And I was thirteen or fourteen years old, watching that scene to that Sophie B Hawkins soundtrack, and I felt more longing than I’d ever known in my life. All the angst in the world wrapped up in my just-teenage heart, but Dylan and Kelly felt it too, and one day that was going to be my life. Or something like it, and it would involve kissing at the very least.

Rob Sheffield was twenty six at the time, and I doubt that scene for him was also merely a most hopeful crystal ball, but he remembered it for whatever reason, and just for that, his book will mean something infinitely more to me.