It is tough to leave the Academy Days. It was such an important part of my life. I’m not talking about in the Glory Days sense, but rather that I recognize how important that step was to me. I’ll also truly appreciate what going to school in Vermont allowed me to do at that age. It is an uncommon opportunity that I was able to take advantage of. I guess the danger of going through an immersive, self relfective exercise like this is that it is easy to get caught up in the emotional riptide. To wish that you could go back and be yourself at 17 again for just one day.
The next era is called Space Mountain and it is quite short as it only lasted from the last week in May to the first week of August, 1983. A couple years earlier, Adam had gotten a job at the Skyline Inn on top of Mount Equinox in Manchester, Vermont. A year later, I was up there too working as the dish washer. This summer, I was 18 and moved from the kitchen to the bar as the bartender. The drinking age was 18 in Vermont back in those days. That was a strange thing. I was a bartender then when I came back to Indiana I would have to wait 3 years before I could go into a bar.
So I lived on top of Mount Equinox for a couple of months with my best friend Adam, his brother Al and 8 or 9 other guys and girls. One day my other best friend Matt came up to visit and he ended up getting hired too. The work was easy, the scenery fantastic and the parties legendary. We called it Space Mountain there is something about sitting on lookout rock at 2:00 am looking down at the lights of Manchester. The monks tore down the inn last summer.
For some reason A Flock Of Seagulls seemed find its way to the stereo pretty frequently that summer. As I discussed a couple posts back, I bought this while I was still in my factory cassette phase in the Academy Days.
I Ran (So Far Away)
Space Age Love Song
Don’t Ask Me
Telecommunications
Modern Love Is Automatic
D.N.A.