Disco Doesn't Suck

My neighbor down the hill has the most beautiful cosmos plant in her front garden. Unfortunately, my phone couldn't figure out that it was the flowers I wanted to photograph; it focused instead on the Bathing Beauty, the mannequin in the bathtub in the background. You can pretty clearly see her legs sticking out of the end of the tub. Her head is at the other end, mostly concealed behind that lavender.

I went to the dentist yesterday for a check-up. Yes, this was my second dental appointment in a couple of weeks, but as I think I mentioned before, my dentist and my hygienist work on different days, so I can never do both a cleaning and a check-up at the same time! It's the craziest system.

Anyway, happily, my teeth are all in good shape. We're watching a few areas where I have aged fillings, but nothing needs any special attention now. They did a thing where the dental assistant ran a wand around the inside of my mouth, over the front, back and chewing surfaces of my teeth, and produced a 3-D image of them. She could then rotate my demonic, lipless grin on a computer screen and show me my teeth in great detail. It was pretty cool. I took a picture of the 3-D image but it's a little creepy -- disembodied teeth look very skull-like -- so I won't inflict it on you. TMI, I'm thinking.

When I sat down in the chair I was carrying a magazine and the dentist asked what I was reading. It happened to be an article in The Atlantic about trigger warnings, in which a feminist writer questioned whether such content warnings are actually harming girls and women by making them less able to confront disturbing information. I gave the dentist a brief summary but as I did so I wondered, what if she's been assaulted in some way that requires a trigger warning? Am I triggering her by merely describing this article?

What a tangled web.



When Jimmy Buffett died several days ago, I thought about the one Buffett album I ever owned -- "Volcano," which as I recall I got for my birthday or for Christmas one year when I was a kid. In my memory, I got it and John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Double Fantasy" album at the same time. I decided to look in my old journals and see if I'd mentioned them, and if my memory was accurate.

Well, surprisingly, although I wrote about getting the "Moonraker" sountrack in 1979, I did not mention records by Jimmy Buffett or John Lennon. At least not that I can find. I definitely owned them both, though, and I'm pretty sure they came together.

What I did find in my journals were chips of an old record, which I glued to the page on Aug. 1, 1981. We were about to leave on vacation and I wrote about buying four rolls of film and two packages of flashcubes (remember those?) at the astonishing price of almost $17, which must have been a fortune to me at age 14. And then I'd have needed to get it all processed! What a nightmare film photography was.

Anyway, I then wrote, "(My brother) and I destroyed his disco records today. We both hate disco, see. Here's an example of what happened to Gloria Gaynor and Amy (sic) Stewart...that's what they get for recording disco. It's their own fault."

Several things are odd about this. I don't hate disco. I love disco. I've always loved disco. In fact, I bought that Gloria Gaynor record. But this was 1981, not too long after an event called "Disco Demolition Night" in which mostly young white men publicly destroyed records made predominantly by black artists, many of them women, and loved by gay listeners. It was the "Disco Sucks" era. People used to walk around with that phrase on t-shirts, and I remember my stepbrother being especially anti-disco. So apparently, I got swept up in the fervor, even though deep down I liked disco myself.

I suspect my brother and I were both just sick of those records, as anybody gets sick of a song they've heard a million times. My participation in "Disco Sucks" was purely opportunistic and prompted by peer pressure. Besides, how was it OK to hate on Gloria Gaynor while listening to Shirley Bassey singing "Moonraker"?!