Entry One Hundred Twenty-Two.
Thursday, 2010.04.15, 5:06 PM CST.
Remembering the Duohouse Pilgrimage.
Current Mood:  Tired and nostalgic.  Current scent:  None.

Hello, everyone.

Well, yesterday marked a very important anniversary for me.  As many of you know, last September, I marked down twenty years of DJing, and I have known that this year would have a LOT of big anniversaries.

Yesterday was one of them.

Back in April 1990, I was still kind of unpopular, but I had been DJing for 6 months and I had a girl I was interested in...  So, I wanted to have a party.  I talked it over with Kevin and Billy (two of my best friends and the other two primary members of my DJ company, EKG Mobile Music), and they liked it, too.

This wasn't just any party, either.  It was a special concept: We would gather at my Kevin's house, watch three movies and eat some pizza.  Then, we would drive over in a row (kind of like a funeral procession) to my house, where I had my entire DJ system (including my light show!) set up in the garage for an evening of music and merriment.

The first Duohouse Pilgrimage party was held on Saturday, April 14th, 1990.

There was a very low turnout, but it was fun.  It was a lot of fun.  Kevin was there with Muffy (his really awesome girlfriend, whom he later married), Billy was there with his date (a foreign exchange student whose name escapes me - Andrea, perhaps?), and I was there with my date, who would later become my girlfriend, attend prom with me, move out of state with her family, and then cheat on me and dump me for a fifteen-year-old skater.  There were others there as well – not many, but people we considered close.

As an event, it was campy, it was goofy, and it was fun.  We watched Heathers, Ozone: Attack of the Redneck Mutants, and Bad Taste - Peter Jackson’s first feature film and arguably one of the greatest movies ever made.

We threw popcorn at the screen for fun.  Well, we did that until Kevin’s dad - who apparently had not been enlightened to the popcorn-throwing part of the plan - saw what we were doing and voiced his objections.   So, we paused the movie at hand and had fun picking up popcorn bits for a while.

We ate cheap-but-decent pizza from Simple Simon’s.  Bad Taste almost made Billy vomit - he actually had to get up and run to the bathroom, but didn’t quite throw up.  (It's a fairly sick film.)  My date introduced me to the wonder of black jelly beans (which, in turn, actually taught me to enjoy licorice).  Neither alcohol nor drugs were involved with the party at all.

Once we got back to my house, the only song I definitely remember playing is the full “Quad: Final Mix” of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” clocking in at around 15 minutes long.  It was a wonderful night, and served as a nice precursor to our senior prom, which occurred six days later.

Over the next year or so, we had a few more Duohouse Pilgrimage parties, but they all pretty much paled in comparison to the first one.

I hated so much of that period of my life, and at the same time, I really loved it.  I have pictures of that first Pilgrimage around here.  Someday, perhaps, I shall scan them in and share them.

More very soon,

Badger