I don’t really need to say much about Talking Heads.  One of my favorite bands.  I can listen to Heaven or This Must Be the Place (naive melody) all day on repeat.  Really.  All day.  Repeat.  There are only a few bands where I can work my way happily through two to three dozen of their songs in a single sitting.  OK, y’all got it — I like Talking Heads.

So, instead of praising the band, I’ll tell you a peripherally related story.

When I was in ninth grade, I went to DC with my friend.  We were both at that age where neither of us had had a girlfriend and we both kind of thought we should have girlfriends, but, trust me, we didn’t have the slightest clue how such a thing might actually come to happen.  The summer before, I had been at a conference with my parents and this Irish girl was there who was the daughter of one of my father’s colleagues and she and I spent some time hanging out playing video games and when I got back I told people I had kissed her which wasn’t actually true but it gave me a shot of confidence to believe that someday a similar event might be true.  Anyway, so there I was in DC with my friend and his dad tells us that he has set us up to hang out with two girls.  To this day, I have no idea why or how he knew ninth grade girls, but they showed up and they were gorgeous.

Seriously gorgeous.  It was like the set-up for a John Hughes movies.  Except my friend and I weren’t even the Anthony Michael Hall character who ends up with Molly Ringwald’s underpants and a night with a cheerleader.  No, we were the pre-Sure-Thing John Cusack  who wears a flashlight on his head and gets stuffed in a trunk.  Oh, and to make it even more like a bad teenage comedy, that Irish girl I told you about — well, it happened that she was also in DC and I had invited her to hang out with us so she was there too.

To recap.  It was me, my friend, two good looking girls and a third good looking girl who also happened to be someone I had lied about kissing.

But I digress.  This post is supposed to be about Talking Heads.  Yes, the band was responsible for great music, but they also were involved in two wildly different movies.  True Stories was a totally surreal odd little nugget that starred John Goodman among others and for no good reason often makes me think about Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.  It is an experience that I wouldn’t really recommend but I kind of enjoyed.  Then there is the landmark concert film Stop Making Sense.  It is a landmark for me because it is the only concert film that I’ve ever actually enjoyed.

I enjoyed it enough to see it more than once.

I enjoyed it enough to take other people to see it.

Can you tell where this is headed?

OK, so we’re sitting around my friend’s dad’s apartment with three girls and no one has any idea what we should do.  Actually, the three girls were getting along and ignoring us completely.  So my friend and I decided that we should see a movie.  Probably because we had some idea that good things happened in the dark at movies, though we also clearly had not thought through the logistics of the three girl two boy dynamic.  We looked at the movie listings.  We had both seen Stop Making Sense and thought that suggesting it would make us seem cool.  The girls said OK skeptically.

I should add that, by this time, I think my friend was reasonably sure I had never kissed the Irish girl because there was obviously no chemistry between us.  Or maybe he was just impressed that I had managed to get a girl to come to a movie with us.  It didn’t really matter.

So we get to the movie theater and run into our first snag.  Despite entire empty rows, the girls decided they would sit together.  In the row behind where my friend and I sat down.  Not good.  The movie started and they were whispering immediately.  A few songs in, they took turns leaning forward to tell us how bored they were.  In between, more whispering, and I’m pretty sure that the Irish girl told the others that there certainly had never been any kissing.  About ten songs in, they were done.  I kept trying to reassure them that it was almost over, but I was basing that on the album I had which had about seven fewer songs than the movie.  So the girls were pissed at me about that too.

Look, it didn’t get any better after that.  There was no triumph of the geeks.  Eventually the girls went home.  At least I got to enjoy the movie and the music.  Sort of.