Mad About Belinda Carlisle
Belinda Carlisle became a favorite singer of mine with her song Heaven Is A Place on Earth back in 1987. I made sure to put that song on my cassette tape compilation. I’d recently gotten more into music and had started recording songs off the radio. Later, her song Circle in the Sand made it onto another compilation as well.
It was her second album that caught my attention, but I’d heard her first solo song Mad About You on the radio before. Mad About You was even featured on one of my favorite shows during the 80s—Growing Pains.
Then her third album Runaway Horses came out. I wanted to buy it, but I couldn’t afford to. I did get the single Summer Rain though. One of my favorite things to do was put on what I called my “peasant dress” and go out in the rain and dance to the song. My mother worried that the dress was see-through, but I didn’t care. It was dark and no one was looking at me in my backyard anyway.
Eventually I made up a routine to Summer Rain, imaging an invisible partner that I danced with. Who was my partner? Mark-Paul Gosselaar of course! One magical night I could have sworn I saw him materialize before my eyes and fade away. When I went back and rewrote my story Damon’s House about my past life with Mark-Paul Gosselaar, I included the song in the story.
Around the same time I came up with a special dance to Belinda’s song Circle in the Sand. I was bored one night and listening to music, when I decided to spin around in a circle to the song. Only I didn’t just spin, I pivoted on one foot while focusing on the light fixture in the middle of the room. This allowed me to stay balanced and not get dizzy. Little did I know that this dance was exactly like the dance of the mystical Whirling Dervishes!
Though her 1991 album Live Your Life Be Free wasn’t a huge success, I still enjoyed it. My friends and I loved the song Emotional Highway. In fact, we did head-rushes to the song! Little Black Book and Live Your Life weren’t bad either.
Later, I went back and made up a dance to her song La Luna from her Runaway Horses Album. It reminded me of Ethan McMillan and the story I wrote Wings of Desire., which appeared in my first collection of short stories, Radiant Darkness. I suppose it reminded me of my characters because they went to Paris and the lyrics of La Luna are all about two people falling in love in Paris.
I missed her 1993 album Real and her 1996 album A Woman and a Man. Neither of those albums sold very well in the USA. She put out a couple of compilations of her greatest hits. I got one of the collections from the library.
In 2010 Belinda put out a memoir called Lips Unsealed, which I picked up at the library out of curiosity. Though I found her self-loathing and drug use interesting to read about, I never did find out why I felt a connection to her music. Her music had an underlying sense of spirituality about it, but her life seemed to missing the spirituality hinted at in her songs.
Recently I read that she put out a French album Viola. I have not heard it, but I plan to get a hold of it and listen to it.
carilynn27 