The opening ceremony of the Olympics was pretty spectacular, what with the anvil with the flames coming out of it, and the skating "sparks." I, myself, can't imagine skating with flames running down my back, but then I'm no longer living life in the fast lane.
During the ceremony, though, I did have a flashback to life in the faster lane (certainly not the fastest by any means). As the Olympic teams were marching onto the field to a selection of music, according to the American announcer, "random American pop songs from the '80s," the American team marched on, and I cracked up laughing. Daddy Cool!? Where did that come from?
The last time I heard Daddy Cool, disco was king, and I was wearing 2" platform sandals, and dancing at Discoabend ("disco night" in German) at a tiny Gasthaus in Traetzhof, Germany, about 20Ks from the border between West and East Germany. In between songs, I was drinking Spezi (Cola mixed 50/50 with German Fanta -- not the fluorescent orange stuff you find here; German Fanta is more like Squirt) and munching on wurst and Pommes (pronounced, roughly, poe-mes) -- aka French fries.
The photo obviously isn't of me at Discoabend, but is rather a contemporary-with-Daddy Cool photo of me and our cat Pippin (Pan rest his cranky little soul) out near the East German border. Pippin loved riding in cars, so we'd take him out driving, and let him go walking on his leash. We almost took him to Austria with us, but the health and import/export details were too fiddly, so he stayed with friends whom he already knew. After we got back from Austria (about a week), we stopped by their house to pick him up. He took one look at us, and went and sat in a corner and wouldn't speak to us at all. Boy was he ticked at having been deserted. He wound up being an international cat (he did cross borders after all), and lived to be 17.
It's amazing the memories that come back from hearing a nearly-forgotten song.
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