Pandemic nostalgia begins

As the coronavirus continues and the country is on lockdown, I'm feeling more nostalgic than ever--and I usually feel pretty nostalgic. So I'm going to try and make one post a day: some of random movie ads, some of pop culture artifacts that mean something to me, photos from movies I've been watching at home, and anything else that helps me escape the current apocalyptic situation, which is so far both frightening (everything closed, jobs lost) and boring (no shuffling zombies in the streets yet). I will undoubtedly post several flashbacks to the summer of 1969 when I discovered top 40 radio. More about those circumstances in later posts. But first, a record from a little earlier.

We were visiting my grandmother in Cleveland in the summer of 1968 and one afternoon, I stumbled on what must have been an episode of American Bandstand which featured Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart performing "Alice Long (You're Still My Favorite Girlfriend)," a song which I discovered later was a follow-up to their previous top 10 hit "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight." The two songs sound similar but at the time (I was 11 and wasn't into much music beyond the Beatles and the Monkees) I had never heard "Tonight." But I loved "Alice Long," and when I got back to Columbus, I bought the single. I'm pretty sure it's the first 45 I bought that had a picture sleeve. I don't have much else to say about it--when I mentioned it in a blog post here back in 2010, I said it was "wonderful bubbly 60s bubblegum" and any listener who had heard "Tonight" first would probably prefer that song. But Alice will always have a place in my bubblegum heart. The video below looks to  have been stretched for widescreen presentation, but the song is intact.