on ghetto blasters

Today I saw something I never thought I would see. I had just woken up, was pottering about in my room, (muttering with dismay at the eve-growing pile of laundry - isn't it just supposed to disappear and magically re-appear in my dresser, clean, fresh and ironed??) and I heard some memory-evoking 80s music drifting up to my window from the street below. It was Whiteney Houston's I wanna dance with somebody. Click on the link now and listen to it in the background so you can get the full experience. I started to shift my weight from side to side, slowing introducing ever more complex and exagerrated movements, until I was the literal embodiment of 80s frizzy-hair-pink-stockings-Fame dance style. I peered out the window to discover unto myself the provenace of this heavenly ditty, and saw on the far side of the road an old black man, hunched over, head adorned with a (probably purloined) yellow workman's hard hat, with nothing less than an old school ghetto blaster nestled on his left shoulder, speakers pointing into his ears. He was obviously a Whitney fan too, and I felt a communion between us as we, each in our own way, shuffled to the vibrancy of that now defunct plastic music.