Does anyone else have a tab hoarding problem? I have a habit of opening tabs on both my computer and my phone and then just leaving them open for easy reference instead of bookmarking them, which requires extra work on both the storage and retrieval ends.

Lately I’ve been thinking that maybe I should begin closing some of these tabs. So what I thought I’d do is maybe once a week open one up and think about why I saved it, write up a blog post about it, thus saving the link forever in a new format, and then close the tab. Eventually, like in 500 weeks, I’ll get to zero-tab status, lol.

So here is the first of 500 “open tab” posts.😂

A couple years ago I started seeing ads for some sort of alcoholic beverage (malt liquor?) sold in cans called White Claw. What really caught my eye was a young woman rollerskating with beautifully nonchalant grace into a convenience store to pick up a package of the drink. There was some thing so ‘70s about her style.

At some point I had seen the ads enough that I became curious about who this woman was. Didn’t take long to turn up an article about her. I kept that tab open because I knew I might want to come back to it again at some point. Then, of course, life happened and I forgot all about it. The article is here if you’d like to read it.

Thinking about rollerskating got me to remembering some rollerskating stuff from my past.

When I was a kid, the grade school down the street was designated a community school. I’m not sure exactly what that was, but I think it was somehow part of LBJ’s Great Society. The building was open many hours of the day, and there were always extensive program offerings going on. Like music lessons, art classes, sports teams, afterschool movies in the gym, swimming lessons in the summer via a portable pool set up in the playground, and rollerskating in the gym on Friday nights.

I was never all that good at rollerskating, and the truth is I was a little afraid of it. I broke my leg rollerskating when I was four years old, and I guess after that I was probably always aware of how fragile bodies are and how easily they can be broken. I tended to be a safe roller skater, never one of those who sped around the floor or “cracked the whip” or practiced fancy moves. My sister, on the other hand, was quite good and especially excelled at “shooting the duck,” which involved crouching down as you skated and extending one leg forward to roll along on the momentum you’d created.

A really strange phenomenon came along when I was in college: roller disco. Check out this cringe worthy skating sequence from a 1979 movie called Roller Boogie.

And check out this even weirder sequence from a 1980 movie called Xanadu, starring Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton John. Poor Gene Kelly. I think this may have been his last film. What a sad way to end such an illustrious career. (I do like the way the beginning of this clip’s “dance” sequence pays tribute to the final moments of the “Broadway Melody Ballet” sequence in Singin’ in the Rain, though!)

Quick aside. The very beginning of this video clip seems quite clearly a tribute to the very last image of the “Broadway Melody Ballet” sequence in Singin’ in the Rain. And the very last image of this roller skating dance sequence in Xanadu, an overhead view of a human “kaleidoscope,” seems to be a tribute to the kaleidoscope from yet another song-and-dance sequence (the “Beautiful Girl” montage) in Singin’ in the Rain.

Which was itself a tribute to the choreography of Busby Berkeley in numerous movies of the 1930s. (Wikipedia article on Busby Berkeley here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busby_Berkeley)

Here’s a Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope dance sequence for reference.

So anyway, although I know this isn’t much of a post, it did allow me to share some random Sunday thoughts with you and, as a bonus, enabled me to close out one of my 500 tabs.

Only 499 to go!😄