For a good time, call....

I am an 80s pop-music junkie, Class of '89. If you're familiar with the country song, "19-something" by Mark Willis, well, then you know something about my life and the world in which I grew up. (Yes, I also like country music.)

As I was interpreting class tonight, the instructor (who is about my age) used the phone number "867-5309" as an example.

Crickets? Am I hearing crickets?? 422 students in this auditorium and not ONE recognized the incredibly monumentus cultural reference.

I. Was. Horrified.

Now, I'm excited to be coming up on 40, since I never thought I'd live to see it as I spent my formative years pissing my parents off to the point that it was surprising I lived to see high school graduation. But c'mon! 1982 is only like 28 years ago.

At best, 1982 was a good 4 or 5 years BEFORE any of the 400+ students in the class was born, which is a thought that totally fuckers up my sense of the world.

Besides the fact that the song "Jenny" is older than any of the students in that classroom, it's completely unfathomable to me to think that not ONE of them even knew of it, since in my mind it's such an iconic (??) number. When I was their age, I was well aware of who Elvis Pressley was, I knew that Paul McCartney was in a music group named after an insect and that set off a huge musical revolution in this country; I even knew and enjoyed music as far back as the 1950s.

For these students to NOT know who Jenny is, and the fact that her number came from a bathroom wall is just painful and wrong in so many ways.

So here's to Pat Benetar, Michael Jackson's Thriller (the album and the epic music video with the rap by Vincent Price), Guns-n-Roses, Maj when she was Desperately Seeking Susan, Culture Club, hair bands, power ballads, parachute pants, Whitney when she was still sober....all of it.

Jenny, Jenny....you give me something I can hold on to.