A lot happens to us when we're in those awkward junior high school years. We spend most of those years trying on who we think we want to be and see what fits best. I was fortunate to grow up in the 70s. When things were both chaotic and free at the same time. The allure of the hippie era was still very alive and well, social constructs were pretty integrated and diversity was everywhere. I was just an ordinary girl with her head in the clouds, daydreaming most of the time and seldom taking anything seriously. It was 1978, I was in eighth grade. My little brother was in sixth grade and for the first time in two years, we were in the same school again. Nothing was out of the ordinary in anything that was happening except, that there was going to be a live band playing at the junior high school dance. I had never seen a live band perform before, it was quite the event in the small town of Albany, IN.
A boy asked me to the dance, I barely knew him, I think we rode the same bus to school. I said sure I would go with him, which simply translated that my mom would drop me off at the door of the school and he would be dropped off by his mother and we'd meet in the school gym at the dance.
I remember it was awkward, I retreated to the comfort of my girlfriends when we all saw one another. We giggled and adored one another, made multiple trips to the bathroom like a group of squirrels and then it was time for the dance to begin. The principal announced a few rules that I'm sure no one heard and then the lights dimmed a little, then he announced, Transit Rockline!
The boy who had asked me to the dance was standing across the gym with his friends, I wished I had just gone alone. I avoided eye contact and he didn't seem to mind. The band started playing and there it was...a little lightning bolt in me that jolted my focus like none other. They were playing rock and roll and to my eighth-grade self, it sounded like a real rock and roll show! The "band" was a group of boys who went to the high school in the neighboring county, but that evening, they were the first rock and roll show I'd ever seen and it was magical!
Ok, sure there was eventually the one boy in the band who had some sort of appeal to my eighth-grade little heart for a minute, but I digress. I was bitten by the music bug, bitten by the sound of the screaming guitar, the drums, the bass, the lights, the entire event. Little did I know that little lightning bolt would be the start of the energy that would eventually manifest years later to become my life in music.
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