This Real People clip of a valley-girl competition in 1982 in the Sherman Oaks Galleria (RIP) hurts in about a hundred different ways. All those Beths and Lauras and Laurens and Loryns and Lauries and Loris — to think (on birthday eve), they’re all in their 40s now, regretting the many afternoons they slathered up in baby oil and laid out. Now the doctors have to literally bag their faces and zap off the melanomas.

I loved the valley girls then and I still do, and may I just add: It never went away. You can hear it across, like, generations now. You can hear (I hope just a trace of) it every time I open my mouth.

(Am thinking fondly of Derba’s mom, the great Winnie McCall, who never quite got the ’80s lingo down. “Gag me with a spoon,” translated into Winniese, became “Go get me a spoon.” Which still cracks us up.)

What seemed like half the freshman class of Bishop McGuinness High School went to see the Go-Go’s on their Vacation tour at the Oklahoma City Myriad Center University of Oklahoma Lloyd Noble Center (speak, memory! Or speak, Derba! Or, you know who would really know — Andrea Martinez). Thanks to the interwebs, I can at least confirm that this happened on October 2, 1982. We had the beat.

A couple days after that, this kid named Mark Marron — who was an ADD thug with a frightening overbite; one of those total assholes who always shows up in movies about how awful high school is — declared the Go-Go’s to be lesbos and called me a fag because I had the Rolling Stone cover of the band (the Annie Leibovitz photo of them in their bras-and-camis) taped up in my locker. I took it down. What a horrible feeling, even now.

From then on, none of the boys (except me) openly liked the Go-Go’s, and all of the girls did. You could write an academic paper on 1980s Bible Belt adolescent gender identification rituals about that — but do include the whole boys-who-play-Ms.-Pac-Man thing as a corollary. (A happier memory: The crisp air of the October 1984 evening the Go-Go’s came back, junior year, on their Talk Show tour and played the OKC Zoo Amphitheater. Utter bliss — dancing around with the cool girls. By then I did more or less what I wanted. What a difference two years makes.)

I stuck with the Go-Go’s even after they broke up. I liked Jane Wiedlin’s Blue Kiss album in ‘85, and I might have (might have) sang along into a hairbrush with Belinda Carlisle’s “Mad About You” a time or two. Svelte, redhead Belinda’s Heaven on Earth is surely one of my all-time guiltiest pleasures, so out of tune (and actually out of tune, on some cuts) with the 120 Minutes aterna-guise I tried to latch onto in college. I stick with them even now: Four tickets to see their “farewell” (yeah, right) reunion tour next month at Wolf Trap. That’ll be $188, please.

What a long way to get around to telling you that the One-Man Book Club seized upon a copy of Lips Unsealed, Belinda Carlisle’s new memoir, upon spying it the other day on the new-releases table in Borders. I had no idea it was even in the works. (I haven’t paid Belinda any attention in years, except to watch her gay son’s YouTube videos.)

Look, I’ve got my own deep nostalgia trip going on lately. I threw my 20-year-college-reunion invite in the trash. I’ve been making a massive playlist of “college songs” and I’m thisclose to dragging out my Mac Plus one of these nights, to plug it in and read all the old letters and musings stored on its hard drive. I don’t need a Belinda Carlisle book just right now, thanks, but …

Well, if you insist.

Here’s the thing: I’ve always wondered why Belinda became so successful, post-Go-Go’s, for doing stuff that is so mediocre. (And actually, the Go-Go’s are not arguably brilliant, either. That was more about a moment and a look and a pop-culture shift from the ’70s to the MTV ’80s.)

Guess what? Belinda wonders the exact same thing.

This book is a horribly wonderful study of the essence of mediocrity, told by someone who’s just as baffled as you and I are about it. I read the book in a night. We go from her mildly unhappy childhood in the San Fernando Valley to the punk heyday in Hollywood, where she lived in the legendarily filthy Canterbury apartment building and knew all the seminal punk and new wave rockers of the “Rodney on the ROQ” era. That’s where the Go-Go’s started — all the stuff you’ve heard before; the dresses made of trash bags, the boozin’ and floozin’; the evolution from unskilled girls with guitars to bubblegum rock group. Who doesn’t love a drug-fueled rock memoir? Once again, I had to get up and go to the kitchen spice rack so I could remind myself: How much is half a gram?

Well, those grams add up. Belinda put so much toot up her nose over the years — to hear her tell it, for pages and pages and pages, it sounds like it stopped being fun around 1985, but she was just getting started. Count me as one of those suckers who believed, when we saw the video for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” or saw her anti-drug “Rock Against Drugs — RAD!” public-service ads, that Belinda looked so good because she kicked drugs. See?

That is not the case. She marched to Bolivia for another 20 years; went on a three-day coke binge as recently as 2005, in a London hotel room. But, she writes, she’s been sober since then — thanks to the usual discovery of Jesusless spirituality, including trips to the river Ganges and dinner parties with Deepak Chopra. Eh, whatever works. Belinda, you’ll understand if we wait and see?

More intriguing is the undercurrent of showbiz that pulls Belinda along as an unenthusiastic celebrity who barely qualifies as a musician — from one bad solo record to the next, through the years, most recently finding herself quickly eliminated on Dancing with the Stars.

The refreshing (and depressing) part is how much blame she’s willing to take. Every time she heard a new recording of her voice — from “Our Lips Are Sealed” on down — she cringed. (America cringed, too, eventually; but Europe loves her.) There’s a great scene when the young Go-Go’s first hear a tape of their debut album, Beauty and the Beat. It was so not the edgy, punk record they set out to make. They were mortified. But the deal was done. Mediocrity worked its ineffable magic. Hank Stuever spent his allowance on it, many times over.

You know what she’s good at? Being a Go-Go. Michael and I went to see them four years ago at the 9:30 Club. They played every track from Beauty and the Beat, in order, to celebrate the album’s 25th anniversary.

I looked around. All the new wave girls from everyone’s high school were there, along with their very best gay male friend. Everybody get on your feet / We know you can dance to the beat…

Is it a book tour or just a long nostalgia trip? And is it my own nostalgia, or some longer epic nostalgia trip that anticipates the demise of the printed word? Yikes! In any case, strap in…

About once a week I have a vivid dream that takes place in Oklahoma City, where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life. Sometimes it involves one of the malls (Quail Springs, or Penn Square before it had a roof, or Shepherd Mall before it emptied out). Sometimes it involves downtown, or the Murrah building. Once in a while, the fully or partially-lit neon Charcoal Oven drive-in sign goes whizzing by, usually during a chase scene. A lot of times the dream involves McGuinness High School. (Diploma revoked! Back to class, Stuever!) Many times I’ve dreamt about Lake Hefner and floods. (Floods are supposed to be significant dream symbols, but I think it means nothing more than the bladder telling the dreaming mind to get up and go pee.)

Almost always in these dreams, the sun has just set and I can see, on the eastern horizon, the row of televsion and radio transmitter towers with their red lights blinking on and off. To me, the towers at night are the most poetic image of my Oklahoma, but maybe they’re something people here don’t think twice about, since they’re always there. I think the towers look like a piece of sublime installation art. Naturally, I can’t find a single image of them online to show you. (Michael Wichita — get out here.) They make a cameo (and copyrighted) appearance here, in a storm-chaser/lightning-fetish web site of some sort. If you have any pictures of the radio/TV towers of OKC at night, send em my way. They are for me like Gatsby’s green light across the lake.

So, another image instead: what if I crib someone’s Flickr photo of the OKC skyline at Christmastime? Not the same effect as the radio towers, but home all the same …

Maybe once a year, for one reason or another (class reunion, funeral) I actually GO to Oklahoma City. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been gone longer (23 years) than I lived here, because the place is still very much with me. I got here Monday night — drove up I-35 from D/FW airport, and saw the skyline customarily aglow with keep-the-Christ-in-Christmas crosses — and had dinner at my Aunt Linda and Uncle Marvin’s new house in Edmond. (The Frisco, Texas, of OKC!) My mother — she’s become such a Tinsel groupie! — was here from Wichita, with cousin Jane.

I read and signed books Tuesday night at Full Circle bookstore in 50 Penn Place. This is a fantastic, long-lasting indie bookstore right in the heart of town. It has tall shelves and lots of nooks and crannies and  fireplaces ablaze. I have many people to thank for the reading — Kit Mauldin and the Full Circle staff, and also Carol Cole-Frowe, who organized a little happy hour for the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, which helped draw a crowd. Plenty of familiar faces turned out for the reading — some I haven’t seen since I read Off Ramp here in 2004 (Janet Martin, the Martines, the Eggers) and some I haven’t  seen since the 1980s (Kathy Judge! Jennifer Lindsey McClintock! Erin Glasgow!) and some I haven’t seen since the last class reunion. Mary (Heffron) Ramsey was there too, with her totally adorbs tyke named Joe.

Also Lou Berney was there. Ah, Lou, we meet at last. It’s downright bizarre how close Lou and I are without ever having met: He went to McGuinness (’82) and so did I (’86). He went to Loyola University in New Orleans (’86) and so did I (’90). He was editor of the Maroon (Fall ‘85) and so was I (Fall ‘87). He’s stayed in touch with Rene Sanchez all these years and so have I. He worked for a while at the Oklahoma Gazette (’87) and so did I (’88). He has a (long-awaited!) novel coming out in January (Gutshot Straight) and I just had a book come out. And yet with all the friends and places we have in common, we have never been in the same room at the same time. It seems I was always getting there just as his trail went cold. I feel like we have so much to talk about! I can’t wait to read his new book and I’ll be blogging about it soon, I’m sure.

And how can I forget Winnie and Bob McCall (Derba’s parents), right in the front row where they belong. Winnie (aka Wee-Wee) is in Tinsel’s acknowledgments. She’s a loyal fan.

So this is a very warm, fireplacey, happy room of people to read to. I decided to read the interlude that comes after chapter 6 in Tinsel. It’s called “The Gap (A Slide Show)” and it’s the part of the book where I wrote six or seven pages of memoir about the Christmases I grew up with. Oklahoma City is the only stop on this tour where reading that part of the book aloud makes sense. The prodigal son returns — one night only.

And the best part? I got the audience (about 25-30 people, maybe more?) to sing the de facto state Christmas carol with me: The B.C. Clark’s jingle. This is a TV ad that has been playing every December on local TV here almost as long as most people can remember. Eventually, Oklahoma’s schoolchildren started singing it in Christmas pageants. Later, in the 1980s, B.C. Clark started running ads of everyday Oklahomans in shopping malls, singing the jingle for the camera. To anyone from here, the Clark’s jingle is literally the sound of Christmas. Thanks to Jennifer Lindsey McClintock for helping me get everyone started. The best thing about this song is that there’s no such thing as off-tune. It seems to be just in everyone’s pitch, or it can be forced there.

Here’s the classic version:

Here’s the video of my audience and me singing it tonight — video courtesy of Jennifer’s husband, Sean:

That makes me happy. I took a long time to sign 30 or so books — because I like to gab. This is happening at every signing; sometimes I know the person and want to catch up on so much, but a lot more times, I’ve just met the person and they have a lot to tell me about their relationship to Christmas and life in general, and I want to hear it all. I may not be selling heaps of books, but it’s such a treat to just talk to people about the book or anything else.

More to come: I did more public radio today for stations in Illinois and the northeast (will post links soon) and will do some stuff with the Oklahoman newspaper tomorrow at their offices. Then it’s a quick visit with Wee-Wee and Bob and then a drive back to D/FW to catch a flight to the Pacific Northwest.