Someone could still get some good from that
The resident blog critic at our house was mocking me on Sunday afternoon. “So you post this big essay declaring, Now I shall write! and then…nothin’. What’s with that?”
I mumbled something about having no further subject at hand that was a worthy follow-up to the announcement that we’re preparing to adopt. He scoffed.
Which is how I come to be writing today about the Bee Gees.
Specifically, I am writing about an artifact displayed in the front window of a junk shop on Lorain Avenue. It was an old, blackened driftwood plank, upon which had been mounted three pages torn from some disco era teen ‘zine: full-page autographed headshots of Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb. The pages had been singed around the edges with a match — to artfully suggest the “hotness” of the brothers Gibb, no doubt —and then mounted with plenty of shiny Modge Podge to the plank.
I expect that the plank was then hung above the bed or on the paneled wall in the basement rec room of some adoring fan, probably a girl. Whenever she was listening to her 8-track of the Spirits Having Flown album, she’d probably whip out her hairbrush microphone and lipsync “Too Much Heaven” as she gazed longingly into the eyes and abundant chest hair of Barry Gibb.
There’s a touching wistfulness to that imagined scene, which may partially explain how such an object managed to survive for at least a quarter century. Nostalgia preserves where practicality and good taste would choose to destroy.