9:59 PM

mollypeck:

The first records I bought with my own money were a pair of 45’s from the Bradley’s department store (where my Mom and I also got our ears pierced the same year): Donna Summer’s “Unconditional Love” and The Kinks’ “Come Dancing”. My first full-length album, however (and this is really embarrassing), was ZZ Top: Eliminator. We spent that Summer at our father’s, so that Mom and Bill could finally have a honeymoon. Though he (like us) did not have cable, he did (unlike us) have a VCR, and he had taped about an hour of MTV at a friend’s house for Ed and I to watch (and watch those videos we did, over, and over, and over). I could probably re-create from memory every video:

Stevie Nicks— Gypsy;
Taco— Puttin on the Ritz;
Michael Jackson— Beat It;
The Human League— Fascination

Among these gems, though, The ZZ Top song “Legs” was my favorite. It reinforced the message I had picked up from my other over-and-over-and-over-on-VHS-favorite, the movie “Grease”: sexy = powerful. Even the prim, dowdy goodie-two-shoes can have her way and get what she wants if she just plays the game and ups the sex appeal.

As soon as I saw the prompt “Legs” (for Bohemea’s words with photo #1), all I could think of was the (stupid, stupid) video, and all I could picture was the cover to the single, with the red hot rod with the blonde at the wheel, and the back-view of the other woman’s seamed-stockinged legs in the foreground (stilettos, leather miniskirt…in the desert? with her wire-frame glasses in her hand?). I had big plans to recreate that image (I even bought a junky pair of stilettos today, because, to my surprise, I have none), but this is as far as I got before I got angry about the setting sun and the shape of my knees, and Ludo wanted to help with every picture, but there’s no yellow lab on that album art, as far as I remember.

(via bohemea)