Blondie and Cigarettes

About ten years ago my best friend and I went through a phase. It sounds kind of funny to start a post like that because after being friends for fifteen some odd years we have been through many (many) phases together, but this particular phase always seems to stand out in my mind. I don’t know who got their hands on the song first, but it all started when we just couldn’t stop busting out to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”. We listened to it everywhere we went; her red Camry, my red Camry, dorm rooms, house parties…it was like nothing we had ever heard. Suddenly we both became very retro, in that sort of innocent way that only 19 year olds can pull off.

I ‘m reminiscing about this particular moment in time because in just about a week and half I will be reuniting with my very dear best friend back East where we are both from. In fact, my bestie now lives in the very town where part of our 60’s/70’s glam transformation took place. I honestly don’t know a lot about the town of Northampton. My brother lived there for quite a few years after he finished high school and my best friend has now lived there for a few years as well. When I was still living in Massachusetts, Northampton was always the place I escaped to when I was feeling “funky”. It was always kind of stifling living in our quiet little farm town on the Connecticut River. In NoHo, there were bookstores, record shops, coffee shops and most importantly vintage boutiques. It was heaven for a small –town girl with stars in her eyes and dreams of the big city.

But let’s get back to the matter at hand, the phase. Looking back, I think the phase was actually about being different than everyone else, which both of us had always been really good at. After about the 85th-hundred time of hearing “Heart of Glass”, the two of us decided we needed a new look to go along with our newfound retro music. Enter Roz’s Place, the most amazing vintage store my teenage eyes had ever laid eyes on (and the inspiration for our obsession with vintage that still exists today). It’s been such a long time since I have set foot in the place, but I can still see it like it was yesterday; tall mannequins dressed from head to toe in vintage fashions, racks and racks of dresses and bell-bottoms, hair-dyes in every color of the rainbow, funky jewelry, sunglasses galore, tons and tons of printed silky scarves, and fancy old-school silver cigarette holders. It’s the scarves and cigarette holders that somehow commanded our attention, and for us seemed to go perfectly with our musical obsession. We left the store with one of each a piece, and in fact I still have the very scarf and now semi-rusty cigarette holder that I bought that day…

Were we really retro? Probably not. Did we look somewhat ridiculous as we jumped back into one of our Camrys, tied our scarves around our heads and smoked out of our cigarette holders for the first time (while listening to Heart of Glass)? Probably. But honestly, that didn’t matter to either one of us at all. We were being different, we were having a blast and most importantly, we were together. This is what I think about as my vacation back East quickly approaches. I’m so excited to visit Northampton, see my friend, and be crazy in a way that only we can pull off. Who knows, maybe this visit will be the beginning of another phase that we will go through together. And you better believe I’m going to be checking out Roz’s Place…so don’t be surprised if I come home with hot pink hair.