[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYkWMAbFVc0]
ABBA and I have a slightly stormy history. I loved them as a kid, of course. Their sprightly, catchy, danceable tunes get young and old alike up and moving. When I was in college (undergrad) we used to play ABBA’s Greatest Hits in the costume shop when we were working on costumes for plays. In fact, Dancing Queen played a cameo in the one-act I got to costume solo. The play was “A Couple Of White Chicks Sitting Around Talking” and ABBA came in after the wild Texan gal took the uptight Westchester County matron out on a shopping spree and a wild night on the town, and they come back to the posh chick’s house dancing and in high spirits.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctzIEjjOfd4]
Aaaand speaking of the devil, you know I couldn’t leave ya hanging!
Then in grad school, I am afraid I got ABBAed out. It seems like ABBA Gold would end up on repeat at the majority of house parties, and I dunno…I was under a lot of stress and pressure, and the excessively chipper disco music just got on my nerves like nothin’ else. I went resolutely off ABBA for about four or five years, but they’ve crept back into my subconscious, and now I have a few ABBA songs in the music mix on Joel’s old Rio Cali MP3 player that I have kind of annexed (he’s got a proper ipod mini, so I’m not depriving him of his music!)
To the end of satisfying my recent ABBA mania, I watched a great documentary on YouTube, the BBC’s “A is for ABBA.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qAH4e0KVGY]
It’s to my current dissatisfaction that I have yet to watch Mamma Mia, but I’m about to add it to the Netflix queue. I don’t care how naff and contrived it may be, it looks cute and has a bunch of ABBA songs, and frankly, my tastes in music aren’t especially exalted.
Speaking of not-particularly-rarified tastes, it’s probably known that I like and liked the Spice Girls, and I realized while watching the ABBA documentary, that a lot of the completely mad clothes that Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice) wore were direct descendants of some of Frida’s decidedly odd costumes. I went through a bit of a Ginger Spice phase in college, wearing stupidly short skirts, midriff-baring tops, and loads of sparkly barrettes and frilly elastics in my hair, so this sort of giddy look holds a rather warm place in my heart. If you’ve never dressed up like a hyperactive, psychedelic tart, you just have no idea how much fun it is!
I’ve got a couple of partyish events to go to this weekend, and you can bet that I will be dressing up in brightly colored, ridiculous-looking clothing because I have no reason not to. I just retrieved my magenta tutu from the shelf above the closet in my workroom, and will be building some kind of stupid outfit around that for tonight. I get too few opportunities to dress up like a colorblind maniac to pass up the ones that do present themselves.