What a fun weekend. Friday night was dinner at Coastal Flats where I had this rocking crab cake with filet mignon. Saturday night I was in Jon Wye’s backyard in silk pajamas, standing over a slaughtered pig, drinking a beer and talking to this sexy chick in a pink nightie while Evil Dead 2 was projected on the wall behind me (and, I should add, Jon wore nothing but woman's underwear all night). Sunday afternoon I was seeing off some friends that are moving to San Francisco – since they didn’t want to cook they got Famous Dave’s Barbeque to cater. After that it was a DCC meeting with a good turnout – lots of excitement over the Counter Culture Festival. To say this was the best weekend ever, well, that would be a disservice to my "sex marathon weekend" which would likely blow your mind if you even attempted to comprehend it – but it was a good weekend.

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Growing up I was perfectly happy with my network cartoons. On the weekdays I could come home to He-Man, G.I.Joe, Transformers and Thundercats. On Saturday mornings I had the more humorous fare, shows like Smurfs, WWF Superstars and the Snorks. Between the shows and the promotional tie-ins like toys, cereal and comic books – network TV and its kid-friendly output were enough to keep me calmly sedated with my six days a week of escapism (it wasn’t until I got older that I discovered the beauty of Sunday afternoon kung-fu flicks and spaghetti westerns).

But then something happened. A new craze was sweeping the neighborhood – this infectious form of entertainment that hopped from kid to kid like the plague, the only casualty being our parent’s wallets. Jim Henson, the man that gave us our beloved Muppets, had a new show in the works called Fraggle Rock. We were enthused, elated, excited as SHIT.

But it was on this thing called “HBO”.

HBO – Home Box Office. Every kid in my neighborhood knew two things about this strange network: 1) It was new and 2) We can’t get it by simply tweaking our antennas. We begged our parents to no end to get us this HBO. We needed HBO so that we can get our half-hour of this magical Fraggle Rock a week.

And Henson fucked with us so bad. Fraggle Rock comics and VHS releases. Kids who got HBO would tape copies of Fraggle Rock and distribute them amongst their friends. I ended up getting a couple of episodes on VHS – it was obviously a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

After endless begging my parents finally caved and got me this HBO thing. I came home from school one day and found it hooked up to our TV. Now, what you need to understand is that this wasn’t cable. Cable hasn’t reached our neighborhood yet, at least I don’t think it did. This was HBO. It was a small brown box that sat on top of our TV with a knob on it. You turn the knob to the right and HBO comes on. You turn it to the left and HBO goes off. (I can’t for the life of me find a picture of this wonderful device on the internet – if anyone else can find one they get bonus points.)

The first time I got to watch Fraggle Rock on this new HBO thing was magic. The way the 3D HBO dropped down from the top of the TV, flashes of light shooting through it, and then the theme song instructing me to dance my fears away. To save my worries for another today.

Let the music play. Down in Fraggle Rock.

I taped all of the episodes, obviously. Watched them over and over again and lent copies of it to my friends. We didn’t have two VCRs so anyone who wanted a copy of my Fraggle Rock tapes had to bring over their own VCR. Eventually other kids in the neighborhood started getting HBO – the kids wanted their Fraggle Rock and the parents liked the fact that they could watch Splash or Romancing the Stone whenever they wanted. Some kids in the neighborhood actually got those big ‘ole satellites only to have Time Warner Cable move in a couple of years later.

Since we had HBO my house became the family hang out for any boxing matches they aired. My Tio Andy was new to the family and a boxing fanatic, some may say our HBO box was the reason he married my Titi Denise. We’d get phone calls from relatives asking if we can tape certain movies for them, they’d be flipping through the TV guide, we became their own private video store (and since there was only one in the neighborhood, Speedos (as I recall, it could have been called Muck-a-Muck for all I know) on Court Street, we got a lot more calls than we could handle).

HBO eventually ended up being dropped by our household until a little show called the Sopranos did to us adults what Fraggle Rock did to us kids.

Dance your fears away. Worries for another day. Let the music play. Got yourself a gun.