Friday, July 11, 2008

Pop Culture Confessions: Fear Street Edition

Fear Street Confession
(which I'm only telling you because I trust you to not bring it up all the time and make fun of me)

A sixth grade radio play assignment inspired me to make an audio recording of Fear Street: Ski Weekend. Using my mom's early 80s tape deck (with microphone!), I forced my cousin and my brother to help me.

I played Doug, Shannon, and Eva. My cousin played Red, Ariel, and Lou. My little brother did special effects; for example, dropping a marble into a Danish butter cookie tin to make a gunshot sound.

The recording process lasted about 2 months because we only had 2 hours a week to work on it. I treated it like we were on a major production schedule, and I made notes on the inside cover of my copy, which I still own and is still my favourite Fear Street book. (Bonus Within A Bonus: Rounding out my Top 3 Fear Street faves are Wrong Number & The New Year's Party.)

To me, the Ski Weekend recording was a masterpiece. I listened to the tapes before I went to bed at night. When completed, it was 10 one hour Maxell audio cassettes filled with friggin' nonsense. We wanted to do Pike's Weekend too, but there were too many characters. I threw the Ski Weekend tapes away when I moved out, because the adult me would clearly never want anyone to hear them. I call that action "the tragedy of my life".

Please use the comments to make your own confession, express solidarity, or heckle me.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ski Weekend as a radio drama? That.. could be kind of awesome, actually. And that's a pretty ambitious sixth grade project!

I'm a little curious as to how you got your little brother to forget about it afterwards though. Mine still rags me mercilessly about my Cher costume.

Alex said...

Nooooo... how could you throw that out! I'm sure it was 10 hours of glory. I would have loved to hear it.

colleenn said...

longwinter, I didn't realize you were the Like Pike blog, which I hadn't checked out till last week through MilkMan's plug. I'm adding you to my list now that I figured out how to make a blogroll.

So, my confession is that the Christopher Pike books were, like the Fear Street books, too cool for me when I was a kid, so I really missed out. When I first saw your blog title but hadn't yet clicked the link, I thought the title referred to the Baby-Sitters Club's Mallory Pike. I was so confused as to why the hell someone would actually like Mallory. When I clicked the link it made sooo much more sense. :)

Jen said...

Nolan - I wish I could tell you hypnosis or something cool like that, but he was about 7 at the time and remembers nothing about it. I have a feeling I'm gonna regret bringing it up...

Alex - I know, I've been beating myself up over it! I also threw out some killer mix tapes. I didn't count on the nostalgia factor.

Colleen - Mallory Pike! I wish. The Pike family needs their own blog. I'm so excited; I'm going to love your Nick blog soooo much!!!