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1984: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 49: December 8, 1984)

Billy Ocean goes sci-fi, The Pointers, .38 Special, and Eurythmics go to the movies, and Diana Ross says goodbye

Stewart Mason
Three Imaginary Girls
11 min readDec 9, 2024

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A Christmas tree in a beautiful mall
Photo by Ron Dauphin on Unsplash

(Note: If you’re new here, you might want to read an introduction to this series to get caught up on what we’re doing. Glad you could make it.)

Three weeks before you leave town forever isn’t a great time to get your first crush on someone in over a year and a half, and yet there we were. It’s a wonder it took that long for me to get big eyes for Carina Waldorf, who was clearly the prettiest girl in the 11th grade. By my standards, but not those of Levelland, Texas, as a whole, in that she wasn’t blonde, didn’t have giant boobs, and wasn’t a cheerleader. Carina was tall, slender, brown-eyed, and had an enormous mass of wavy black hair that she always wore down. The day I realized she was stunningly beautiful was the day she had a recital for her ballet class in Lubbock and didn’t have time to go home and change, so she went to school in her leotard and a wrap skirt. There was a poster of Kate Bush that was the art-school equivalent of the Farrah poster of the late ’70s, in which Kate was similarly dressed. And in retrospect, that was exactly why I suddenly had it bad for Carina: I had never before realized how much she looked like Kate…

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Three Imaginary Girls
Three Imaginary Girls

Published in Three Imaginary Girls

Medium’s sparkly indie-pop press! Music discovery, memoir, mixtapes and more.

Stewart Mason
Stewart Mason

Written by Stewart Mason

From West Texas. In Boston. It’s mostly gonna be music, food, and cats.

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