Pony Up

When this whole “bronies” thing reared its ugly little rainbow-maned head earlier this year, I shrugged it off. Do not have time for memes. It came up again when it made the front page of The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago. Then a friend mentioned that her teenage brother was putting up bronie videos on YouTube.

I still do not want to delve any deeper into this world. But I will say that I had a too-old-for-My-Little-Ponies phase in 1986.

When my sister and I were roughly 11 and 14, we'd spend after-school moments playing board games, her quitting and pissing me off,  which might be exacerbated by my jumping up, stepping on a Sorry piece, it snapping in two and gouging the bottom of my bare foot, then pummeling ensuing (she’d always start it—she may have been younger but she was bigger and an instigator, though if she’s reading this she may beg to differ) my chasing her with a knife, her hiding in the bathroom while I poked the knife under the door, and one of us eventually running to call my mom at work to relay the torment.

But there were other times where we would turn on My Little Pony (this didn’t work with Heathcliff whose catchy theme song will probably stick in my craw till the day I die) with the sound off and put on my sister's 45 of Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam’s “All Cried Out” at the same time and they would totally synch up so that the action on screen would make sense with the tempo and lyrics. Not quite Dark Side of the Rainbow, but an amusing distraction at the time.

I don’t know how to edit videos together so you will have to settle for the Lisa Lisa video (which for the record, I was too cool and jaded for in '86 because I was into The Cure via the new-at-the-time collection of singles, Standing on a Beach).

I forgot how kind of low-key and dank The Cure's older before-my-time stuff was. Watch “A Forest” too. After reading the comment that Robert Smith looks like Ben Affleck in this video, I can't unsee the resemblance.