Life in Eden

Steven Stromberg

I want my MTV-era Debbie Harry

A co-worker walked into my office the other day with a look of dread, as if
his best friend had just stolen his only cow. He plopped down on one of my
two purple guest chairs and let out a massive sigh.

I turned from my laptop and, like I was talking to a puppy who had just made
doo-doo on the kitchen floor I grudgingly asked him the question he had
clearly come in to hear.

"What's wrong?"

"I just read on the Web," he said, "that Debbie Harry is 62 years old. Did
you hear me? Sixty-two!"

He closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. He then stood up and
slowly dragged himself back to his office. I nodded to him sympathetically
as he walked out. I felt his pain.

In the fall of 1981 I was living in a small dorm room at Concordia College
in Moorhead, Minn. In what will be no surprise to any of you over the age of
30, there was no cable TV anywhere in my residence hall, except in the lower
level lounge.

This dingy lounge was affectionately called "the Pit." The name could have
come from its location in the bowels of the building, or alternatively, it
could have come from the fact that it generally smelled like a bowel
movement.

It housed some dirty, mostly broken pool tables where guys were forced to
use golf clubs and chair legs as cues. There were also a few Ping-Pong
tables but balls and paddles were mostly missing in action. You guessed it.
My dorm brethren played with the tops of pizza boxes, record album covers
and even underwear that was really, really dirty, making them a tad stiff.

The adjacent laundry room added quite a bit of ambiance to the area. The
washers and dryers were so old that when you fired one up it was like
listening to the take off of an F-15. But for all its detractions, the space
did have one big draw, one thing that kept us all coming back night after
night (no, we didn't study, what of it?)

The Pit had just one big television positioned over the fireplace. And that
blessed TV had cable. In that stinky, dark, lounge we could escape the
dreary existence of Moorhead, Minn., the third windiest city in the nation,
and occasionally watch some decent television programming.

Adding to the allure of the Pit was the fact that during the week, it was
the only area in the building that the college allowed members of the
opposite sex to gather together. This policy ended up being the best birth
control this side of seeing Larry the Cable Guy in a thong bikini.

Back in those days it was not uncommon to be sitting next to a guy who had
never seen a TV where you could get more than one or two fuzzy local
stations from some rabbit ears attached to the back of the set. It was
eerily similar to watching chimps or apes react to a cell phone ringing at
Como Zoo. They kind of stare blankly and scratch themselves, head tilted to
one side.

But the best part about sitting down in that dark, dank lounge in the men's
dorm was watching a new channel that had launched just that summer, just as
I, an impressionable incoming freshman, was embarking on a new life. That
channel was MTV.

Young people won't understand the immense excitement of this new media. You
see, in the '70s if you were really into an artist or band, you listened to
their records on your stereo turntable and memorized the record album and
sleeve inserts. Photographs, if any were included, were all you had to
connect to your favorite singer, guitarist or cellist (Yes, cellist -
Electric Light Orchestra folks). There was no Internet, no E! Entertainment
television, etc. It was all we had.

This new MTV channel gave us the opportunity to see our musical idols
singing and dancing to their top hits of the day. We watched for hours as
Duran Duran, Cindy Lauper and Van Halen rocked our world. We grooved in
"manly" ways to the videos of The Police, Boy George and RATT. If you think
kids constantly text messaging today is a foolhardy pursuit, thank goodness
you did not see the young men of my dorm staring comatose at that screen
hour after hour for days on end.

Then, in the winter of my freshman year, the videos of a new punk rock group
called Blondie hit the MTV rotation. Its lead singer was a very sexy, very
sultry blonde named Debbie Harry. She was that rare temptress of the era, a
woman who could rock. She sang songs titled "Heart of Glass," "Call Me" and
"One Way or Another." Wow!

And now she's 62. Let's try not to think about it.