This was another song from "The Lost Years" that I really, really liked when I got home. It didn't get much airplay in the summer of 1987 because the song had been released a year earlier. But when it did come on the radio, I would nearly rip the knob off trying to turn it up. I loved the synthesizer bass line mixed with the electronic drum sounds. And the women's voices screaming "Wah!" before the chorus was quite enjoyable.
Part of the reason I liked this song so much is because during my freshman year at Ricks I took a humanities course right before I left for Sweden. My favorite painting that we studied in that class was "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli. It featured a young, serene Venus with long red hair being blown by the west wind over the ocean waves while standing sans clothing on a white, scalloped shell. The painting reminds me of the many aspects of love--the physical, emotional, and intellectual--and how it always seems to be emerging from the subconscious ocean but never quite touches the shore of conscious awareness. And no matter how hard we may try to dress it up as something else, we can never quite get the fabric of our choosing over its shoulders. This song reminded me of that painting.
I also liked the song because the women in Bananarama were really hot. I'd been on a mission for two years stuck in dumpy apartments with male companions, and we spent most of each day trying to not look at all of the gorgeous Swedish women that surrounded us. Two years of repressing normal feelings and forcing my eyes to look the other way produced a good amount of awkwardness around women when I got home. And even when I got home I didn't stay home for long, since the folks moved to Twin Falls three weeks after I returned. That meant I didn't know any "safe" girls that could introduce me to other girls that I might be interested in spending time with outside of a church building. Nor did I have much of an opportunity to interact with any young women, since I worked the night shift at the Tupperware plant in Jerome. I'd come home at 7:30 in the morning, watch MTV and movies until I passed out around noon, and try to stay sleep until 9:00 or 10:00 at night. Then I'd get up, shower, eat something that functioned as breakfast, and then head back to the Tupperware plant to start my next shift at 11:00 PM. I tried to stay on this same sleep schedule on my days off because it was hard to stay awake at work if I didn't. This all meant that I really didn't have any opportunity to date anyone, so the summer of 1987 was kind of a miserable time for me socially. Watching three beautiful Bananaramas dance in the Venus video turned out to be a very important part of my post-mission recovery efforts to get my libido back to normal levels for a 21-year-old single guy.
Need a cure for those after-mission love blahs? Wah! She's got it! Yeah, baby, she's got it!
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