Dec. 20: Favourite memory of 1984

 I say all the time that 1984 was a great year for music. It was the year of Purple Rain. It was the year of Thriller. It was the year of Like a Virgin. If you know me, then you know that Purple Rain is my favourite of the three.

I started 1984 as a Grade 4 student at St. Gerard's School. My teacher was Don Poilievre, the adopted father of Canada's Conservative Party of Canada leader, Pierre Poilievre. Don Polievre had a mustache. He doesn't anymore. 

On January 3 of 1984, I turned 11. That was the first year mom made me a baked alaska cake for my birthday. It is also the year I fell in love with a heavy metal band called Twisted Sister. By the way, Twisted Sister once released a Christmas album. Here is a picture of it:

The lead singer of Twisted Sister was a transvestite named Dee Snider. I'm not sure if it's blasphemous to let a transvestite sing O Come All Ye Faithful. I'm already on the record as saying that Twisted Sister's song Burn in Hell is more accurate, theologically speaking, than a lot of the mush that passes for Contemporary Christian Music today. Jesus is NOT your boyfriend.

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There were three extremely popular movies in the summer of 1984. They were Ghostbusters, Purple Rain, and Karate Kid. I was too young to get into Purple Rain and Karate Kid didn't appeal to me because I thought it was a martial arts flick, so Ghostbusters was where it's at. I have a vague recollection of someone's mother taking a bunch of us to see it one day. My best friend, Jason, howled at the "this man has no dick" line that Bill Murray rattled off. He kept repeating it on the ride home until someone told him to be quiet.

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I guess I don't have any outstanding memories of 1984 other than to say it's the year where I discovered popular music. It's probably also the year I started liking girls, including one in Mr. Poilievre's class named Rachel Bouchard, who moved away that year and has been swallowed up by the past. 

I have an outstanding memory from September of 1984. It was my first day of Grade 5 and our teacher, Mme Janssen, told us that one of our responsibilities would be to serve as hall monitors. That meant you got to wear an orange sash and patrol the halls during recess. If some kid came in, you had to tell them to go outside. It was a power trip when a grade 5 kid got to tell a grade 6 kid to go outside.

I liked being a hall monitor even though most of my classmates hated it. I guess I was a power trippy kid.