Got Jana a 70s era turntable and a pair of cabinet speakers for her birthday. Very retro-hip. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so excited over a gift. For our date, after eating delicious vegan meaty substances at Orange County’s new Native Foods, then went to the Salvation Army to scrounge for LPs*.

We returned with many classics, including (the following link to the CD versions, of course):

Born in the U.S.A.

Colour By Numbers

Rio

Synchronicity

South Pacific (1958 Film Soundtrack)

Each record was cheaper than an iTunes download.

The South Pacific soundtrack was especially nostalgic, ’cause we used to belt out the songs in my last missionary apartment in Japan:

We get letters doused with perfume
We get dizzy from the smell!
What don’t we get?
You know darn well!

We have nothin’ to put on a clean white suit for
What we need is what there ain’t no substitute for…

…

There is nothin’ like a dame,
Nothin’ in the world,
There is nothin’ you can name
That is anythin’ like a dame!

Nothin’ else was built the same,
Nothin’ in the world
As the soft and wavy frame
Like the silhouette of a dame!

…

There ain’t a thing that’s wrong with any man here
That can’t be cured by pullin’ him near
A girly, womanly, female, feminine dame!

As celibate Mormon missionaries in our sexual prime and separated by thousands of miles of Pacific ocean from our girlfriends, we could relate to those sailors. I remember one of the 20-year-old elders prancing around our little apartment with a towel wrapped around his head, singing into the back of a hairbrush. I don’t trust my memory entirely, however, because images from my mission in Japan seem to have mixed with those from the musical to produce quaint visions of young elders in white shirts and ties moving choreographed through the apartment, swinging on the bedposts of the bunkbeds, with a snow-covered Fuji as our backdrop.

The good ol’ days seem to be getting better.

*Old-school CDs, read with needles instead of lasers.