Chapter 12: Air Band Mania

                                                    Practicing my sexy 80s poses

I only lived in town until I was 5 years old. My television watching was limited to stations 2, 5, 11, and 38. The only shows I clearly remember watching on a regular basis were mostly on PBS: “Sesame Street,” “The Electric Company,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” and some campy show called “ZOOM,” which featured super-excited kids in striped rugby shirts dancing around to the show’s theme song. Other than that, I remember lots of “Hee Haw,” “The Brady Bunch,” “The Donny & Marie Show,” and the nightly news. The rest of those formative years were fondly spent doing things like “playing.” If I wasn’t outside playing Kick the Can or Capture the Flag with neighbor kids, I was happily playing with my Barbies. Life was good.

As I headed into my adolescent years, the television selection suddenly changed. Even though we lived in the country and couldn’t even get cable TV yet, it was a treat to have two additional channels: 26 and 32. Channel 32 introduced me to such classic reruns as “Gidget” and “The Partridge Family,” which I happily watched when bored in the summertime. Saturday nights always included “The Love Boat” followed by “Fantasy Island,” usually accompanied by large recyclable glass bottles of Pepsi and a bag of Doritos.

As for the “city kids,” they had cable. That included access to actual music videos all day long on MTV; I had to settle for a show called “Friday Night Videos.” If you were lucky, your family sprung for the ultimate luxury: HBO. HBO was a true learning ground for my friends and me; what I hadn’t learned on the bus, I learned by watching “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Valley Girl.”

When I look back on all of my favorite shows, it’s clear that music played a huge part in everything. Whether it was the opening jazz and dance sequences of “The Cosby Show,” all of Michael’s and Janet Jackson’s videos, or The Brady Bunch performing as “The Silver Platters,” I loved it all. It really was no surprise that I’d ended up loving a new show that seemed to combine everything I adored into one deliciously terrible package: music, performance, dancing, costumes, and regular people like me pursuing a little bit of fame. Yes, I’m talking about none other than “Puttin’ on the Hits.”

They say everything old is new again, and lip-syncing is definitely no exception. While kids today believe that LL Cool J or Jimmy Fallon had invented lip-syncing competitions, nothing could be farther from the truth. “Puttin’ on the Hits” had paved the way for all lip-sync shows after it.