Under Pressure

As a general rule the first thing that I do every morning, after I’ve made my cup of delicious Decaf Coffee, is to log on to the internet and check my email.

Today there were just 22 emails, mainly because I had checked mail at 2300 hours last night and deleted more than 200 emails.

One of today’s 22 emails was from a friend who lives in Annapolis, Maryland. I haven’t heard from him for more that a year and hadn’t seen him for nearly 10 years (at my combined birthday and going away party in June 1998). Another friend ran into him at the Annapolis Mall and gave him my new email address. Needless to say I was shocked when I saw his name as the sender.

It was a brief message including Merry Christmas wishes. In the message he wrote “I think you’ll like this” and added a link to You Tube. It was a music video featuring Queen and David Bowie doing “Under Pressure”.

Back in the early 1990’s this was one of our favorite party songs. My roommates and I had at least 3 major (60 to 80 attendees) house parties each year. The highlight (other than me usually making an ass of myself) of these parties was my pretending to sing two songs by Queen.

The first was “Bohemian Rhapsody” where I would get all the guests to sing along by holding a turned off microphone towards them. I had the microphone turned off for obvious reasons; my voice. The stereo volume was usually high enough to drown me out.

The second, and most requested song, was done by me and my friend “Bones” - Under Pressure. I did the Freddie Mercury part and he did David Bowie. We had a choreographed routine that was better than the original. Our act was so good that my current girlfriend (read this as the girl that I was having sex with) asked me if I was a closet homosexual (I have our performance on video and I can see why she asked that question – we were that good at acting the parts).

I wasted more than three hours today viewing videos on You Tube. It was a great trip down memory lane and a good waste of time. One video led me to another and another and another.

The final video that I watched was by "The Godfather of Soul" and "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business," Mr. James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti, doing the JB Classic "It's a Man's Man's Man's World".

How I arrived to this point after viewing the Queen/Bowie classic “Under Pressure” video is a great story. All I will say is that you should take the trip, you might like it as much as I did.

The Beach Bum