The Feelies – The High Road

Sophomore year of college, 1986, I lived in a brand new dorm with a roommate that was just unluck of the draw. We had nothing in common, hadn’t known each other before, and I mostly tried to avoid being in the room at the same time as her. She had a group of friends that also lived on our hallway so at first she spent a lot of time in their rooms. But somewhere midway through the fall semester she had a falling out with them all so she was in our room more. She transferred after the first semester and I got a new roommate who was placed with me because she was on academic probation and they felt she needed to be away from the distraction of her boyfriend, Vinny, back in South Philly.

Most of the girls on our hallway were the stereotypical big, teased, permed hair, tons of baby blue eyeshadow kind of girls you see in 80s movies. There were two other girls who were more like me though. One of them really seemed cool. She had a Room With a View poster on the wall, instead of the ubiquitous Top Gun, and she even knew the Feelies. She was from New Jersey (along with half of the campus it felt like) and she’d had a summer job at some newspaper or something, where someone in the band worked. I can’t remember the details, lo these 37 years later, but it was like three degrees of separation from my heroes. Even if she was totally nonchalant about it, that was enough to make me a little nervous around her. She also had a boyfriend who was pretty cool which made her seem way more successful than I saw myself as being.

Since I never achieved true friend status with her, I kind of lost track of the two of them once that year was over. I saw the boyfriend now and then at the campus radio station but that was more like across a room full of people sightings and let’s be honest, I would probably have avoided talking to him anyway for fear of saying something stupid.

I got thinking about them today though because I read that Rosalynn Carter died. I was reading her obituary and remembered that a few years ago, after watching a documentary called, Jimmy Carter, Rock & Roll President, I got curious about what Amy Carter was doing. When I Googled her I saw that she had married a guy who had the same name as the boyfriend of the girl down the hall my sophomore year. I thought that seemed like a weird coincidence. But today I fell down the rabbit hole and I can now confirm, it is the same guy. They got divorced but they have a kid together, and it is just crazy to think about. I am 1000% sure this guy would never remember me, but I can still picture him in his girlfriend’s dorm room with the Room With a View poster and this album playing on the stereo.

(You should check out that documentary if you haven't before.)