Vendredi V - High School Musical Edition

It's EstrogenFest at the PM house this weekend. Right after lunch today, The Husband and The Boy left for some solid man-bonding time on their road trip up to Steinbach.

And why, you might ask, are they heading back to Steinbach for the weekend?

If you're a local resident, you already know the answer to this question: Tom Cochrane (recently-announced inductee into the Canadian Walk of Fame!) is playing an outdoor concert in the Extra Foods parking lot at the Steinbach summer festival tomorrow night.

And, if you know The Husband at all, you will know that one of his favouritest artists of all time is Mr. Cochrane. As soon as he heard about the concert last weekend, he was immediately making plans to head up for it.

So, of course, we've had the all-Tommy-all-the-time music channel going at our house this week. It totally takes me back, since Tom Cochrane was all the rage back when I was in high school. And it gets me into the mood for:

Top 5 Songs from My High School Days Soundtrack

1. "Life is a Highway" Natch. The first gift I ever bought for The Husband was this CD, back when we had been dating for six weeks. I may or may not have been fourteen, and it is entirely possible that my mother drove me to St. Vital mall to look for the perfect gift for my boyfriend. It was, indeed, the perfect gift. He popped it into the Prelude's CD player, and listened to it constantly. As in "how many times can I play Life is a Highway between my house and McDonald's" constantly.

2. "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)" You know, I never quite understood the parentheses in that song title. Is it supposed to be optional? Some sort of an aside? But what I did understand was that this song, its release coinciding so nicely with my attendance at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (again with the superfluous punctuation!) at the King's Theatre movie cinema in Steinbach with my almost-sorta-might-be-my-boyfriend (he of the above) along with a group of friends, was totally our song.

3. "Dance a Cachuca" When I was in grade 12, our music teacher decided we had the magical combination of enough strong voices in various parts. We did The Gondoliers that year, much to the jealousy of the previous year who had to do Bye Bye Birdie. [snicker] We actually hired a choreographer from The Big City and I got to be a principal dancer. It can't have been because of my coordination, given that I was routinely called "Wookie-Girl" in those days, but perhaps my teacher whispered a kind word for me in her ear since all my friends had real parts and I was still in the chorus.

4. "Witness" Music was a huge part of my life in high school. Not content with attending twice-daily choir/ensemble rehearsals, dropping French so I could be in said rehearsals, and hanging out in the choir room so much that we didn't bother going to our lockers and just left our crap in the practice rooms, some friends and I formed a touring musical group. We toured each other's churches. We called ourselves "Witness." We were convinced we were The Awesome.

5. "The River" Grad songs are such a huge deal. What you choose defines your year. It will forever remind you of the bittersweetness of leaving behind one's youth and facing the Real World ahead, of saying goodbye to friends you likely won't see again. (Except maybe at Extra Foods in two years.) Due to some serious vote-splitting, our year somehow chose Ramble On (is that Led Zeppelin? I don't even know).

It was a terrible song. We who had not voted for it were angry. So we hijacked the evening, and convinced our music teacher that instead of the traditional "small group of elite grade 12 choir singers" performing a choir song, a group consisting of four grade eleven boys (hey, they were all our dates), one not-in-choir-but-was-totally-gonna-make-it-as-a-country-music-star-guitar-playing-soloist, and a few actual graduates would perform one of the runner-up songs.