If you were born in the same era as I was, that area in Mother Ignacia where you find Ten Years After and East St. Louis will probably instantaneously make you reminisce about the good old days when you didn't have enough in your pocket to have a night out with friends on a whim and so you patiently await the next pay day because you had no choice. You were probably in your early 20s, just started with your first job, or left the first one after one week because it just didn't fulfill your greater need to try to fix the problems of society at the time. The corner of East St. Louis and Ten Years After was the place you gravitate to when you and your friends wanted to hang out and have a couple of cold ones, because Manila was just too far and Makati was for the rich.
So Twenty-or-so Years After, my friends and I decided to visit that old haunt, surprised to learn that it's now called TYA, later on realizing the new name makes sense, seeing as we're coming back after all those years and we've been friends after all those years.
It's no surprise then that we hear the songs played along with the music videos of our youth (everything from the 80s, some I don't even recognize myself, but based on the hairstyle and the fashion statement of the singers on the videos, no doubt are from the 80s). We dance on our seats, trying to remember the moves and the grooves that go along with that kind of music. We look at the people around and asked ourselves disbelievingly: are we that old? They seemed to be enjoying the music like we were, but we can't be that old. Then we realized, the only people there under 25 were the bartenders and the waitresses.
But it still felt good to be around people who knew that 80s music is not the "classics" and that TYA is still worth going back to, even though Greenbelt, The Fort and Eastwood are considered cooler nowadays.
No comments:
Post a Comment