I'm Free (Heaven Helps The Man)

Make-up for an evening of one-acts.

Late summer, 1984. It’s a Sunday night, the next morning is the first day of school. I am lying in bed, probably around 10 PM because in spite of the fact that I was sixteen years old, I had great anxiety about not getting enough sleep, and unlike most kids my age, I got up ninety minutes before school started (and it only took ten minutes for me to bike to school.)

The radio next to my bed was on. I had the radio on all night, every night, from 1977 until I went to college. I fiddled with the volume knob until it was just quiet enough so that I could hear it without having to work too hard to hear it, and not so loud that it would keep me up. First WGCL (1977-1982) then WMMS (1982-1986). Saturday nights I might fall asleep to WCLV Saturday Night, at least until high school when the odds were good that I would be up late weekends.

But it was the night before my first day of junior year, and I was listening to WMMS. Lights were out, I was resting, relaxing. The song I’m Free (Heaven Helps The Man) by Kenny Loggins came on. It starts with this low, atmospheric, bass note syncopation before busting open with a guitar riff and some higher keyboard notes and an upbeat tempo.

I suddenly sat up in bed. I mean, I gasped, and I sat up, shocked and desperate, the way you feel when it’s midnight and you remember you have a book report on something you haven’t read, or that you had forgotten someone’s birthday. But it wasn’t either of those things.

The song I’m Free is from the Footloose motion picture soundtrack. The video shows the singer breaking out of prison (he’s free!) then hooking up with Virginia Madsen, and generally being on the run. It’s about freedom.

But it wasn’t the video. I wasn’t watching the video. It have have been the refrain, which includes a chorus of young people yelling, “I’m free!”

In that moment, in a split second, in the firing of a synapse, I recalled when the first single from Footloose had been released, the title track, back at the beginning of the year. I had resisted the dance thing, but everyone was dancing, the boys as well as the girls (ever since the end of disco, it had been taboo) and then I developed a crush on this one girl and there were these dances, at school, at church, at cast parties and private parties, and teen night at Spanky’s -- she was always there, and I had to do something about that.

Goofing in a Spanish photo booth.

I asked my mom if we could go clothes shopping and she was very, very surprised because neither of my two older brothers had ever asked such a thing and we went to TJMaxx and I got a dozen outfits, it must have set her back a hundred dollars.

And a short, Reagan-era haircut.

That spring I had been to Sibs Weekend at O.U. which for reasons that should be obvious I cannot remember. After the spring musical a number of us produced an evening of one-acts, I directed my first scene.

Ghostbusters opened that June, one of the funniest movies of all time, I saw it no less than ten times in the theater that summer.

That July I spent a month in northwest Spain, learning conversational Spanish, the uses of vermouth, how to smoke horrible tobacco, defending America to skeptical natives, skinny dipping, and yes, working out in discos, every afternoon, every night.

Returning home, summer concluded with band practice, more late nights, dancing in driveways. And now the summer of 1984 was at an end, time to return to school.

In a moment the sheer scope of activity overwhelmed me. This song made me think of that song, and everything that had happened to me, and every place that I had been in between.

And I felt that terrible, sinking sensation, hearing that chorus of teenagers shouting, I’m free, that there was a whole world happening out there, and that that girl was still out there, and that I was in bed, accomplishing nothing.

The Great Blizzard of 1978

Late January 1978, the Great Blizzard. Children, sit down. Let me tell you a story.

Seventy mile-per-hour winds, heavy snow and temperatures close to zero brought the Great Lakes region to a standstill for several days.

That was my fourth grade year. I was the age my son is today, about nine and a half. The previous year was the first I came into awareness of the wider world. Prior to that I did not really know much about pop culture or politics. 1977 was Three Mile Island, the New York City Blackout, the space shuttle Enterprise and Star Wars. Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and Charlie Chaplin died that year, and I already knew who they all were.

That was also the year I started listening to pop radio, pretty much non-stop. January, dark evening after dark evening, and for many snow days, listening to G98. The top charting hits of that month, they may make you think of many other things, but they make me think of unending snow, and bone-penetrating cold; We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions, Come Sail Away, The Name of the Game, Just the Way You Are, and the aptly-named Slip Slidin’ Away.

We all stayed in our houses during the blizzard itself, but the after-effects lasted for weeks. Fortunately, my best friends lived two short blocks away, there was indoor play, but with so many days off, much of the time was spent at home, on my own, watching TV, drawing cartoons … and driving my mother crazy.


Mother was a home maintenance expert, or what we used to call a housewife. And she had her own life, one which my houseboundness encroached upon. I have no idea what my brothers, aged 13 and 16, were up to or where they were. The middle and high schools were also closed, but they were independent enough to have conspired to get away with the assistance of friends and older friends.

Mom had art appreciation classes at CMA, and asked if I wanted to wander around the art museum while she was there. Can you imagine that? Nine year-old kid, wandering around an art museum entirely unattended. In the 1970s, that was a great premise for a YA novel. Today we’d be the lead story on FOX 8.

Gets better – I didn’t want to investigate the art museum, I was more interested in the Natural History Museum. So I wandered around that place unattended, for several hours. Taxidermy is the aroma of my childhood.

There used to be an exhibit documenting the effects of pollution, located near the entrance to the building. It was very upsetting, a replica toxic waste site, a dump with oil covered gulls and all manner of household product containers wrapped in discarded plastic bags, choking a freshwater pond. Thank goodness that exhibit isn’t there anymore to trouble my thoughts.

Other days, mom would have classes at the Lakewood Public Library, and I would haunt the microfilm desk, taking out spools and spools of the New Yorker, just to look at the cartoons. Not just any New Yorkers, mind you. I started in 1925.

Of course, it wasn't all about keeping me preoccupied when she had other things to do. We'd sometimes go to the Rocky River Rec Center, and hold hands and ice skate while they played Bob Seger's Night Moves album on the loudspeakers.

My mother turns 80 next month, and it makes me think of things like this.

Source:
Remember Blizzard of Jan 26, 1978? Weather Historians Recall Blizzard of Legend