Oscar Wilde, A Night In Bangkok and A Letter To My Younger Self

I was Banana Republic a few weeks ago. I was bored, looking at the sale stuff. The sale stuff was boring. As I was about to leave, a song I loved in late high school came on. I actually said, out loud, "You have got to be kidding me." I 'm sure the woman browsing next to me assumed I meant the "sale" prices. Now one thing BR does consistently well, is their music mix (do they sell it on iTunes? I need to check). The song was "One Night In Bangkok" from the play Chess. The music is by the guys from Abba. It's sung/rapped by a British actor, Murray Head,  pretending to be an American grandmaster. It's catchy. It's about as cheesy as Velveeta. But along with Hungry Like the Wolf (Duran Duran) it was right up there with my favorites. So of course I downloaded it. I even found the video on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnqj31VPNoE
The song got some heavy rotation on my iPod. And the more I listened to it, I had to wonder-what, exactly was the appeal of it? Why did I like this song so much?  These are the things I think of while on the Precor (along with will this ever pay off? can I have a rice crispy treat at Starbucks? why don't French women get fat? but I digress, as I often do) Murray Head looks like 80s Don Henley, true, but I never actually cared too much for solo Don Henley.

In the video, Murray Head wears a white suit like Simon Le Bon in "Hungry Like the Wolf" video.

But that wasn't it.

It's the women.

The videos all featured "exotic" women. Hungry Like The Wolf was even filmed in Sri Lanka.

It's hard to imagine now, but being Indian back then was being a total anomoly. Maybe some kind of a Star Trek creature made out of silica. Well maybe not in India. But it was here. (And come to think of it, wasn't my other high school favorite, Captain James T. Kirk, sometimes enamored of green aliens?) I really didn't fit in, and that's bad enough in high school.  And different certainly is *not* a trait that gets too many dances in high school.
But these guys, in these videos, appeared to like different! (And I know you didn't have to be Indian to feel this way in high school...now; it could be Italian (Mystic Pizza) or red-headed (Molly Ringwald)...

You know those exercises where you're supposed to write your younger self a letter? I never got it. I always thought it was kinda stupid- since what would it change? 

Yet,this belated, possibly Precor induced delerium insight makes me think: if I could send high school me a message, it would be this Oscar Wilde quote:

My play was a complete sucess.

The audience, a total failure.

And like Oscar's audiences, mine have caught up too.

;)