I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE and the upcoming BALLADS OF SUBURBIA... and she rocks on so many levels, it's crazy!
I found true love of the denim variety at Ragstock the summer before freshman year. Ragstock was a big thrift store in a neighborhood of Chicago that my friends and I simply referred to as "Clark and Belmont" after the intersection. It was an alternative mecca at the time. The corner Dunkin' Donuts was better known as Punk 'n Donuts because the street punks sat outside of it spare changing. Now I call the area by it's proper name, Lakeview, and it's exactly as yuppie as it sounds. Everything went downhill when they put in that Starbucks across from Punk 'n Donuts sometime near the end of high school. But at the beginning of high school "Clark and Belmont" was my favorite place to shop and I felt I'd pulled off quite a feat by convincing my mom to give me the back to school shopping money she planned to spend on me at the mall and letting me shop on my own. I didn't want "new," boring mall clothing. I wanted clothes that were already broken in, not to mention totally unique.
It was on that excursion that I found the jeans. They were men's jeans, a little bit baggy on me, and had been worn and washed enough times that the fabric was soft and it had faded from medium blue to nearly white in some spots. They were perfect except for one thing: they lacked holes in the knees. But that was easily fixed. I grabbed some sandpaper from my dad's toolbox, put the jeans on and rubbed. It wouldn't have worked so well if the jeans were new. The fabric would have torn instead of frayed. But it worked just fine on these and after I tossed them in the dryer to create more of those little white strings around the holes that I loved to play with, they looked exactly how I wanted them too, like I'd been breaking them in for years.
What memories do you associate with your first love... of the denim variety? Leave a comment below and you will be entered to win a signed copy of I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE!