Over the weekend I found myself listening to AOL's awesome 80s alternative radio station....unfortunately, listening to it got me in LOTS of trouble because I impulsively went on the Amazon MP3 store and bought beautiful stuff like The OMD Singles:

and this amazing single I'd somehow forgotten about:

("Rain in the Summertime")

and also this:






I must have been musically asleep through much of the 80s because I didn't remember a lot of what AOL played on Saturday and Sunday...so many great sounds.

You should try it sometime:

aol radio

...the feeling...






For some of us there's this thing that starts when we're young and we see our first romantic comedy or hear a wonderful love song or see someone special for the first time...we're not cynical yet...we haven't learned that most of that stuff is nothing but a bunch of lies...a BIG bunch of lies

...when we get older and realize that love probably isn't in the cards for us, if we're romantic at heart, we still don't let that get to the core of who we are and spoil us.

...we still smile when we see elderly couples walking in the park, holding hands...we still let out a burst of joy when our friend tells us she's getting married...we still cry at movies where the two people in love finally tell each other how they feel...

...we still (no matter how many years have gone by) just hope.

Even though I have long admired Karen Carpenter's lovely singing voice I really didn't want to buy or read the new biography about her. Way back in the mid-90s I read another book (The Carpenters: The Untold Story by Ray Coleman) that somehow managed to sound sincere and exploitative at the same time. While Randy L. Schmidt is no doubt 100% sincere and about as far from sensationalistic as a writer can get, Little Girl Blue leaves me feeling so sad and as if everything I just finished reading was nothing more than a futile experience...like watching your favorite tear-jerker movie and expecting it to end differently.

The bio is very well-written and Karen Carpenter emerges not only as the very talented and kind woman she was, but also as a funny and witty person who valued friendship and family over the shallow things celebrities sometimes embrace.

We learn of some of her many experiences in the recording studio and some of the things she liked (she was crazy about I Love Lucy), but it would have been neat to know more about those kinds of things...of course, it's possible that kind of info just wasn't available. The extensive notes and bibliography Schmidt include makes it clear that he is a first-rate researcher and worked very hard on this touching book.

Definitely not THAT Mr. Peanut!

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross (so far, at least!) is a very haunting and intiguing read...so what if Entertainment Weekly magazine gave it a C? It can be a bit too bleak at times and even a bit too odd (usually, nothing's ever too odd for me) but besides the suspense and bizarre relationship that the husband and wife share there's the underlying issue of  weight (and weight loss) that I've never seen captured so well by a male writer before...

When I was seven or eight (I think) I was playing with my sister in our living room while some tv movie played on in the background. I'm pretty sure it was an ABC movie. In an almost haunting way I've never forgotten this because of what I remember about the movie (even though it's over thirty years later.)

For anyone too young to recall (or too busy to watch tv!:) ) the ABC movie of the week was as much a part of the prime time line-up as "Happy Days" or "Charlie's Angels." The movies could be amazingly cheesy, but they were sometimes actually better than you could ever imagine (The Cracker Factory with Natalie Wood comes to mind.)

In the scene of the movie I'm thinking of two women were out to lunch, both of them stylish and gorgeous. One of them, a blond, wore an incredibly vivid shade of red lipstick and nail polish. We're talking a red so red it jumped off the screen and scared me. The blond must have been nervous or mad because her nails were digging into the palms of her hand so deep blood started to run.

Now I know this sounds bizarre. But I had this dream about it the other night and unlike most of my dreams, I think this is a memory, but the more I think about it the more I wonder. It just doesn't sound like something that would have been on tv, especially back then...

So I'm hoping to track down the book pictured above and find out once and for all if what I'm remembering is memory or dream...