Thought for the day - cassettes

i am so happy that my new stereo that Michael got me for our anniversary has a tape player on it.  i still have so many cassettes that i just cannot throw away yet....yes, i know...pack rat, hoarder, whatever.  But i really do enjoy them and some are just simply irreplaceable.  Kids today, or hell, even people in their 20's and 30's, just do not understand the beauty of the cassette tape.  They will never know the joys of making a mixed tape for yourself or a friend or a romantic interest.  They will never know the anguish of having to wait for the radio to play a certain song and you have to hold the recorder up to the speaker to get it on the cassette.  It is definitely a lost art.

When i was in college, my friends and i made a lot and i mean A LOT of mixed tapes for each other.  I guess now maybe people do it with cd's or playlists or something.  But having to look for the music and record it onto a tape was time consuming.  And then, you had to actually estimate how long each song was because tape sides were either 30 or 45 minutes only.  If you went over and the tape ran out, then you had to do it all over again and that was very frustrating!  i've kept every mixed tape that was made for me in college.  i sometimes wonder if the people i made them for kept them as well.  And now that i have a tape player again, i can go back and listening to them anew!

Today, while i was doing some cleaning, i found a tape from 1986 that i made.  That year, we took a road trip to Washington, DC to see our Uncle Bernie.  It was a wonderful trip full of great memories.  In those days, though, one had to make one's own fun on a long car trip.  We didn't have the convenience of ipads and laptops and such.  Usually, fun involved reading a book or doing mad libs or putting a tape in your Sony Walkman.  For that specific trip, i spent weeks making tapes of tv shows.  i would put the tape recorder up to the television set and record the audio of different sitcom episodes.  i figured that would take up a great deal of the car ride for me.

This particular tape has an episode of "Newhart" on Side A and "Designing Women" on Side B.  This was easy to do because they played back to back on Monday nights.  i remember recording them from tv....hitting the pause button to skip over the commercials.  i recorded some other shows like "The Cosby Show", "The Jeffersons", and "The Golden Girls".  i don't know whatever happened to those other tapes because this is the only one i can find.  And, of course, the DW episode is the beauty pageant one with the infamous Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia speech....still an amazing moment in sitcom history.

So, as i find more cassette tapes...and i know that i have more in the garage...i am going to really enjoy going to back and listening to them and reliving many wonderful memories.   The mixed tapes in particular.  Someone took the time to pick out these songs just for me.  Someone cared enough to to that.  i love it!

Cheers