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Nostalgia
So after 40 something years, Astroworld is closing at the end of the month, and everyone in town is doing the whole "I remember when" thing. The Houston Press got on the bandwagon, and I think everyone else can just stop, because this is probably the most perfect story ever about a cheesy theme park in the 70s/80s.
Quote:
Everyone, it seems, has at least one AstroWorld memory. Including roots rocker Jesse Dayton, mainstay of stages in Houston and Austin, who's played with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Ray Price. He writes:
"I was a under-developed skinny sophomore in high school, trying desperately to get in the pants of this girl who was your classic bombshell-blonde senior, but she wouldn't have anything to do with me.
"One day I noticed that she had the band Cheap Trick written about ten different ways on the cover of her Algebra 2 book…a friend of mine told me Cheap Trick was playing in two weeks at AstroWorld…so I immediately got tickets for the show. I told her that I had backstage passes and that she would definitely get to meet Robin Zander, the singer of Cheap Trick…It was total bullshit.
"We get there…do the usual…ride the Cyclone, smoke a joint in the parking lot, play Galaga for an hour, get wet on the Bamboo Shoot…the whole time she's treating me like her little buddy/friend…zero rhythm from her! We go into the theater, and we wait for the band to come on. The whole time she's asking me, 'Why don't we just walk backstage?' 'When am I gonna meet Robin?'…I make every bad excuse you could make ('Ummm…these are only after-show passes'), praying for them to come onstage so she'd stop hounding me.
"They come out…it's a killer show…they do an encore of 'Surrender' and we all sing along…then the golden moment arrives…Do I tell her I lost the backstage passes?
"She starts walking over to the backstage area and I'm sweating bullets, then one of the roadies for the band immediately says, 'The meet and greet is over here.' He pulls us over with ten other people into a little area and there they are…Tom, Bunny, Rick and Robin Zander himself. She meets Robin…he flirts with her for all of five minutes…She never knows anything about me not having the backstage passes.
"We head out to the big empty parking lot, turn on Cheap Trick's Dream Police cassette in my old man's Suburban and then she proceeds to get completely naked and bangs my lights out right there in the AstroWorld parking lot.
"I felt like the king of the world…or maybe just the king of AstroWorld."
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"In the olden days before the internet, you'd take this sort of person for a ride out into the woods and shoot them, as Darwin intended, before he could spawn."--Will the Vampire People Leave the Lobby? pg 79
Last edited by Replaced_Texan; 10-12-2005 at 03:26 PM..
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