The Mix Tape

My car and my husband's car are both in the shop.  Because of this, we have been driving my mother-in-laws car.  Its a 1992 car (but only has 120,000 miles on it) and comes fully equipped with am/fm and cassette player. I like having my own choice of music to play in my car, so, finally, this morning I decided to grab a cassette tape I had seen in a jewelry box.  I grabbed the tape on my way out the car, and held my breath as I stuck it into the tape slot.  I had no idea if the cassette player or this old tape even worked.  I immediately pushed rewind to wind the tape to the beginning, as it looked left somewhere in the middle.  After it finally rewound, the tape made a funny chipmunky-scratchy sound, so my finger shot out to the eject button.  Phew, the tape popped out!  It looked okay, so I thought I would give it one more try. TADA!, Jim Morrison's voice sang "Come on Baby Light My Fire".. WOOHOO!

I was off down the road and down memory lane.  I remember this mix tape, a construct of two Twenty-Something girls that hadn't quite found the love they were looking for.  My best friend and I listened to this tape A LOT.  We would listen to it quite often while we worked out with our "Body by Jake" Ab machine, "Body By Jake" Thigh Machine, stepper, hula hoop, twist board rotation.  We called it the "sexy tape", primarily, because of the Paula Cole song "Feelin' Love".  If I recall, it was constructed to play from beginning to end like a story that starts with longing and desire and ends with, well, conquest, I guess.

Since I haven't had a LOT of driving to do today I am only through side one of the tape.  It's in the real lovey mushy section right now.  Though we used songs from different time periods, there are a lot of mid-late 90's songs in there, so the tape is dated.  I can also tell we really wanted to put one Phish song on it because there is a very misplaced "Water in the Sky".

My husband and I were discussing the lost art of the mix-tape.  Though it is easier to make a CD/MP3 mix on the computer, anymore, there was this proud feeling of accomplishment that came with the time and effort of a mix tape.  You had to listen to all the songs while you made it, pause the tape and wait for the perfect time to un-pause it.  I remember the CD/Cassette recorder that we made the tape on, I remember our deliberations on the ensemble, and the boy, girl, boy, girl song fashion.  So far, it is still a very enjoyable tape!