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Monday, January 20, 2020

Addicted to Love was Our Song

[Trying out an idea to run microfiction to go with some of the daily sketches... This is the first attempt. Not quite sure if it works as well as it played out in my head, but I'm looking at these flash fiction pieces as sketches themselves. Enjoy!]


Another kiss is all you need

It was the winter of ’86 when Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” came into our lives. It was a catchy tune, but mostly it was an iconic video that sprang a fashion trend whereas every club girl could pass as a super model, and all it took was a little black dress, pumps, and the reddest lips you could paste on (gloss optional, in my opinion).

Azzedine Alaïa became aspirational. The whole video was like a fantasy/dream sequence in the minds of girls and young women from their teens into their thirties—and it the video has had remarkable staying power.

It could be argued that Robert Palmer touched on the human condition of the young at heart. Addicted to love is a lovely way to describe that need to be perpetually thunderstruck . And while the video’s imagery may toy with sensuality, the more romantic among us may have taken the words in a more poetic sense.

You can't be saved
Oblivion is all you crave

Personally, the words did not mean much to me. I liked the easy beat. I loved the fashion! It defined a good portion of my closet for the 80s and several decades beyond it. Granted, there were other style icons that influenced my look during the Greed Decade: from Madonna to Cindy Lauper, from Debbie Harry to Boy George to Prince, and from Tina Turner to David Bowie. It was more a look than a statement, but it spoke to our fluidity and the desperate need we all had to be edgy.

Somehow we’d graduated from the Me Generation to wanting to be different like everybody else and our own personal, living magazine cover (whether Vogue or GQ depended on whether it was a week day or the weekend).

Punk, sexpot, and ingénue all in one! That was my twenties in a nutshell. And I did spend a good portion of it falling in and out of love. Not too many heartbreaks, I just fell out of love and moved on to the next adventure.

I prided myself on the fact that I was pretty neutral about the process. I did not invite much drama into my life, especially not involving love. Love, to me, was as stylized as my hair and my look down to my toes. I knew I was superficial, but I was okay with that.

Then I met and got involved with Axel, a German expat that rocked my world to the core. He liked to point out that I craved him as some of our peers craved cocaine, but I waved off his words, and laughed it off. I tried to dismiss it, but he hit on the same theme Robert Palmer was singing about, in almost the very same words…

Whoa, you like to think that you're immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough
You know you're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love

Was he right? Perhaps. I dismissed it nevertheless. In my mind, I was with him for a lot of reasons—none of them love related. But I did like the idea of building a fantasy love life with him. It made no difference after he caught himself in the middle of a sudden heart attack that struck him down in a matter of minutes. I knew I would miss him and I paid my respects at his funeral. I mean, I didn’t give condolences to his wife… That would have been fucking rude! But I did wear my Robert Palmer Girl outfit to the funeral.


It was the winter of 1989, and at the church there were three Madonnas, four Tinas, one Sade, and a sea of Laura Ashley loving suburbanites. I loved that I was the slick, stylish presence to usher him to the other side. I sashayed down the steps of St. Patrick’s cathedral singing my favorite 1980s song--our song.

Might as well face it, you're addicted to love
Might as well face it, you're addicted to love
Might as well face it, you're addicted to love
Might as well face it, you're addicted to love
Might as well face it, you're addicted to love