QE2, Albany, NY

``How can you possibly like '80s music better than '70s,'' my friend Mark challenged me in one of those fourth-pitcher bar conversations. It was the time of night when local pubs buzz with such inanity, somewhere in between the hum of post work chit-chat and the sloppy squeals of last-drink confessions.

I was supposed to be returning my kid's video. But I'd run into a group of pre-kid friends and decided what I really needed was a drink. Two hours and a couple of gin and tonics later, I was arguing the merits of Depeche Mode while the label to Shrek 2 got slowly soaked in Coors Light.

We were discussing '80s night at The Fuze Box. My birthday was in a week and my friend Maria suggested we go. Mark, whose taste runs more to Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, was disgusted. How can you dance to that stuff? he asked.

Mark didn't go to high school in Albany in the 1980s. He'd never started a Friday night in the dusty gloom of a back booth at the State Street Pub (The Smiths) and then migrated down Lark Street to 288 (The Cure), where the weirdness on the second floor was, well, a little too weird, and then finished the evening, which was now Saturday morning, on Central Avenue by climbing the stairs and praying the big lady with bouffant hair didn't ask for ID at Puttin' on the Ritz (Dead or Alive, Modern English, Wham, Alphaville, Pet Shop Boys). Mark had never stood outside the door to QE2, shivering and wishing for a fake ID, but never getting in. QE2, the center of everything. The spot where the best live bands played and the real punk rockers from England partied when they came through town.

It's context, I said. Music is about context. Context and history.

Chris Rock once said that your favorite music is whatever you were listening to when you first started having sex. He's got a point. If I were trapped on a desert island with only one CD, I'd bring something live by the Grateful Dead. But there's also a special place for the music you were listening to just before that. The music that can take you back to a time when passion was for friendships, and late night conversations, and hair.

I spent my sophomore year of high school in Albany. I arrived in the fall of 1984, two days before school started, a confused 14-year-old with a red beret and cardigan
collection. I was fresh off the plane from Florida where I'd lived for three months. Before
that it was suburban San Diego for nine months, before that it was Oregon.

It would be two years until I would fall in love for the first time. Two and half until I would know what it's like to have your heart broken. Even lust was somewhat theoretical - I harbored vague feelings about the drummer for General Public, and I spent hours staring at a Falco jacket cover wondering what it would be like to run my fingers down the singer's cheekbones. I imagined riding across a beach on the back of a Vespa, my arms wrapped around a dark-haired mod in a thick green trench coat, The Who's Quadrophenia playing in the background.

I knew no one in Albany except my grandparents whose two-family house we'd just moved into. My little brother and I were sharing a pullout sofa in the living room until the downstairs apartment opened up. On my first day at Albany High, I wore my red beret and got teased for being a Guardian Angel. What were the kids were talking about? I was too dazed to be lonely. A few weeks later, I met Jen.

Sometimes the difference between life-threatening darkness and run-of-mill abject teen misery is one friend. Jen was that person for me. Sometimes the difference between abject teen misery and sweet sweaty escape is one mindless dance tune. Tesla Girls comes to mind.

Jen and I got lopsided, multi-layered hair cuts that horrified her parents. My mom was just happy I had a friend. We found a collection of other misfits -- mostly foreign exchange students, poetry-types and kids who were struggling with their sexual identities. And we discovered Lark Street.

The foreign-exchange students refused to believe that you had to be 19 -- the legal drinking age at the time -- to go to a nightclub. In Europe, they assured us, all teenagers went to nightclubs. A couple of recent transplants from England backed them up on this. It was healthier, they said. Americans were too uptight. That's why we had so many alcoholics, they said.

Jen and I were game. Who were we to contribute to America's problem with alcohol? We didn't drink that much anyway. Jen was a good kid, and I was broke. We wanted to dance.

For a girl who'd spent most of her life on a farm in Oregon listening to Cat Stevens and Willie Nelson, five hours in a dark night club with the throbbing beats and synthetic voices of bands like The Psychedelic Furs running through my body was shocking, like someone throwing back a heavy curtain to reveal that the world was a much different place than first imagined. And somewhere in that discovery was the faint promise that things could change, that there were cities and people out there to be discovered, that maybe, sometime in the future, I would find a place to call home.

It didn't even last a year. Half way through the school year, the drinking age changed from 19 to 21. We were regulars, so some places still let us in, but as the new law took hold it was harder and harder to smile your way past the doormen. In the fall, I moved to Vermont, and started my fourth high school in three years.

When I came back to visit, the heart of the scene had moved to QE2. I stood outside begging and flirting but never got in. Eventually, I gave up. I grew my hair out, fell in love with a mystical hippy dude and started listening to the Grateful Dead.

Music is context. Context and memory. Context and memory and friendship. Air thick and sweet with the smell of a clove cigarette, the cold wind blowing down Central Avenue at 4 in the morning as you and your friends, with half a bottle of hair gel between you, stumble around digging in your pockets to scrounge loose change for breakfast.

Maria wanted to go to The Fuze Box for my birthday. A Saturday night. Eighties night.
I wondered if she knew what she was asking.

The Fuze Box had moved a few years ago and taken over the old QE2 building. I'd been there plenty of times on Thursday Swing Nights and danced to Bobby Darin and Sarah Vaughan. The music was too different and the martinis too briny to remind me of the building's past. But Saturday night was different. I could get in this time, without being carded. Jen lives in Seattle and my IPod is full of Regina Belle and Wyclef Jean. Was there anything left to go back for, or would it just be weird?

"Are you worried it would make you feel old,'' a friend asked, when I broached the
idea. No. One advantage to being miserable as a teenager is the freedom to enjoy aging. Every birthday is one more year's distance from 13. Plus, I am shameless enough to think I can still dance.

But like so much at that time of life, QE2 was out of reach. The club was the real thing, the adult world, the scene I wanted but wasn't quite ready to handle. And when I listen to 80's music, I want to go back to a time before grown-up things. When the zany ecstasy of bouncing around a dance floor to Come On Eileen was a strange cocktail of innocence and longing. When three minutes of the right beat could take care of anything.