Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Tuesday Tuneage
Pat Benatar - "You Better Run"
1980


In a lunch room scene in 1982's Fast Times At Ridgemont High, the greatest teen comedy ever made, Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) says to Linda (Phoebe Cates): "That girl looks just like Pat Benatar!" To which Linda responds that Ridgemont High in fact has three girls who have cultivated the Pat Benatar look. Eighteen years later I was in the Entry with my friend Jim, we were checking out The Phones, a Fargo-Moorhead band who had a Minneapolis scene heyday back in the eighties. The crowd was largely (all?) people our age, folks in their mid-thirties and up. You had the sense that there were a few married couples who had hired a Friday night babysitter so that they could go out and relive a slice of their twenties. Nothing wrong with that, The Phones were blasting dance-y music and the crowd was eating it up. At one point Jim pointed to a gal wearing tights and a headband dancing on the floor and said: "That girl looks just like Pat Benatar!"

So anyway ... in case you had forgotten ... Here is the classic Pat Benatar look: Short hair with bangs and ears exposed, high cheekbones, a top with horizontal stripes that shows a lot of shoulder and the upper back, a totally unneccessary belt (how did she get those pants on?), and boots. The Rascals did this tune first and best, but once again: How did she get those pants on??