Everything I Couldn’t Throw Away
Concert tickets, celebrity crushes, radio contests… and one very unfortunate crush on a Sears rug salesman.
Every move begins with good intentions.
This time, I promised myself I’d finally be ruthless.
Donate.
Sell.
Recycle.
Throw away.
After all, Yunki and I are packing up our home in Mérida and moving back to Pennsylvania. We don’t need to haul around stuff that we’ve carried across half the world.
Then I reached the photo albums and scrapbooks.
That was my first mistake.
Those innocent-looking boxes have followed me from New Jersey to Maryland, then to London, Qatar, Mexico, and now…back to Pennsylvania.
They’re also incredibly heavy.
Mental note for when I arrive: Scan everything.
I’ve apparently been making this same promise for about twenty years.
As I lifted one scrapbook into a moving box, a stack of yellowed papers slipped onto the floor.
Suddenly, I wasn’t packing anymore.
I was back in high school.
Within minutes I’d rediscovered Elton John tickets I was never allowed to use, proof that I’d once appeared on television for roughly three seconds, fan mail from a teen idol, celebrity autographs I have no memory of collecting, and a short story about a Sears rug salesman who had no idea he was the love of my seventeen-year-old life.
As a teenager, I had a hobby that would make absolutely no sense to anyone under forty.
I entered radio contests.
Constantly.
Albums.
Concert tickets.
Television appearances.
If a DJ said, “Caller number nine,” I was already dialing our rotary phone like my life depended on it.
And somehow…
I actually won.
A lot.
I even won a windsurfer.
Considering I lived in central New Jersey and had never been windsurfing in my life, this seemed like an odd prize.
So I sold it for around $3,000.
The buyer also asked me out.
I declined.
Looking back, selling the windsurfer may have been my smartest financial decision.
Declining the date was probably my second.
Then I found the Elton John concert tickets for the Spectrum in Philadelphia on July 6, 1976.
Not just the tickets.
The letter announcing I’d won them.
I had completely forgotten.
This was Elton John at peak Elton John.
Sequins.
Outrageous glasses.
Duck costumes.
The whole glorious spectacle.
I was beyond excited.
My parents…
were less enthusiastic.
Their answer was simple.
“No.”
Today I probably could have sold the tickets online in about thirty seconds.
Back then?
You’d have to place a newspaper classified ad, find a buyer, arrange to meet them…
None of that was happening.
So somewhere inside Philadelphia’s Spectrum sat two empty seats.
I’ve often wondered if anyone looked over during the concert and thought,
“Who on earth skips Elton John?”
Apparently…
me.
The Bee Gees were another story.
This time I paid with money I’d earned working part-time in the record department at Sears.
I still have the newspaper advertisement for the concert.
The Madison Square Garden letter.
The ticket stub for September 11, 1979.
Even the souvenir program.
I was convinced this was going to be one of the greatest nights of my young life.
It was.
Mostly.
The only tiny issue was my seat.
Let’s just say Barry Gibb looked fantastic.
I assume.
From where I was sitting, the Bee Gees resembled three exceptionally well-dressed ants.
There were no giant video screens.
No livestream.
No zoom lens on your phone.
Just faith…
And a very active imagination.
The scrapbook kept giving.
There was a letter from Michael Lembeck, better known to my teenage self as Kaptain Kool, the impossibly cool frontman of the Saturday morning TV group Kaptain Kool and the Kongs, years before he became an actor and later a successful television director.
I’d written him a fan letter, and to my amazement, he actually wrote back.
There was even a poem tucked inside.
Imagine that happening today.
Then I uncovered the invitation to appear on Philadelphia’s Steel Pier Show.
Basically, Atlantic City’s budget version of American Bandstand.
My friend Patty and I were thrilled.
Until we arrived at the show filming.
We had packed exactly…
two tops.
Apparently everyone else had packed the wardrobe department from Saturday Night Fever.
Even worse, they guarded their spots on the dance floor like Olympic athletes defending a gold medal.
Every time we danced toward the camera…
we somehow danced away from it again.
Our episode finally aired a couple weeks later. The episode was co-hosted by singer Melba Moore, and one of the musical guests was Sister Sledge, just before they became international stars.
I believe my left arm made a brief appearance.
Maybe half my hair.
The local dancers had done an excellent job of making sure the tourists from New Jersey stayed well out of camera range.
Just when I thought the scrapbook couldn’t surprise me again…
Out fell my high school creative writing assignments.
Including one unforgettable masterpiece.
An ode to the Sears rug salesman.
His name was Rich.
In my teenage imagination, he was basically a cross between Al Pacino and Frankie Valli.
My English teacher loved it.
She wrote that it showed maturity and creativity.
Apparently she chose not to comment on my highly questionable muse.
Mixed among everything else were celebrity autographs.
Frank Stallone.
Yes…that Frank Stallone. Sylvester’s younger brother, who scored a hit with “Far From Over” from Staying Alive and appeared in several movies alongside his brother.
Why do I have his autograph?
I honestly have no idea.
More autographs…
Peter Benchley, author of Jaws.
Robert Fuller, the hunky actor from the hit TV show Emergency!
To this day, I honestly can’t remember how I acquired half of them.
Teenage JoAnne apparently had a much more exciting social calendar than adult JoAnne remembers.
As I sat on the floor surrounded by fading ticket stubs, fan letters, newspaper clippings and celebrity crushes, I realized something.
None of these things are particularly valuable.
Most people would probably throw them away without a second thought.
But together…
they tell the story of a teenage girl who loved music, wrote fan letters, entered every contest she could find, believed celebrities might actually write back, and apparently thought the rug department at Sears was the most romantic place on earth.
Honestly…
teenage JoAnne was delightfully weird.
She was also apparently incapable of throwing away a single piece of paper.
I carefully slid the brittle scrapbook back into its box.
No, I still haven’t scanned it.
Apparently it’s making one more international move.
I’ve since realized that packing isn’t really about deciding what to keep.
It’s about deciding which version of yourself you’re ready to carry into the next chapter.
Maybe that’s what packing really is.
Not saying goodbye to the past.
Just introducing your younger self to the person you’ve become.
And realizing they all still get to come along.
I loved this trip down memory lane, JoAnne! I disagree that these are unimportant to anyone. These are artifacts of what life was like in a time that we will never see again. They show all these quotidian aspects that are absolutely fascinating because they don’t exist (and also for the nostalgia value).
Of course, I personally have my own collection of these things, though my life in upstate New York was not nearly as interesting as yours. 😉 So I am a kindred spirit in hanging onto scrapbooks.
And they’ve had an interesting role in my life. The first book I wrote was from “a memory box in the attic” of World War II Army nurse who served in Fiji and India with a unit sponsored by John Hopkins Hospital. In the box were her diaries which started on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, tons of snapshots she’d taken and lots of other momentoes from her time there. She was long since deceased, and the Army had disbanded the unit shortly after the conclusion of the war. But through the archaeology of this box, I was able to construct a book the chronicled what daily life was like over there for those serving offering a rare glimpse, just something that few people know about and the only in-print book about an army medical unit no longer exists.
While our boxes don’t have the dramatic history surrounding them, I still think that the record of a time that no longer exists is both important and precious.
Signed, a fellow momento hoarder with purpose 😂😂
"Packing isn't really about deciding what to keep. It's about deciding which version of yourself you're ready to carry into the next chapter." That one stopped me.
My husband and I have declared 2027 our purge year — 27 years in this house, room by room. I keep telling myself I'll be ruthless. Then I remember I haven't opened most of those boxes yet.