the first round
(3) Rupert Holmes, Escape (The Piña Colada Song)
shook
(14) Debbie Gibson, Shake Your Love
148-107
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 8.

nicole walker on “escape (The Piña Colada Song)”

The narrative goes like this: A man is tired of his partner. They had been together too long. Like a worn out recording of a favorite song. His lady is sleeping next to him while he reads the paper. He turns to the personal ads (for ye millennials and Gen-z’s, this is Tinder of the newsprint).
He recognizes he doesn’t worry about how his lady might feel. And he knows that sounds kinda mean. But the relationship has fallen into the same old dull routine.
So he takes out his own personal as that confirms that he also likes Piña coladas and is into 70s album cover fantasies like making love on the dunes of the cape and getting caught in the rain. He has to meet her by tomorrow noon at a bar called O’Malley’s where they’ll plan their escape.
 (I’m not sure about the urgency, but it does make the incipient cheating seem imminent.)
But with an irony befitting Sophocles or O Henry, who walks into the room? His own lovely lady. He knows her smile in an instant. He knows curve of her face. She says, with such smooth insouciance, “oh, it’s you.” And then they laugh. And he says, I never knew you, that you liked piña coladas. Or getting caught in the rain. Or the feel of the ocean. Or the taste of champagne. The list of details he didn’t know about her! Well, what is love but discovering someone anew?

My husband Erik is what I think is strict and he thinks is setting standards with the kids. Max is the youngest. He plays a lot of basketball, which my husband approves of. Our neighbors rolled their old hoop down to the cul de sac so he could practice his shots. He spent six hours in 28 degree weather las Friday throwing balls into the air. He also spends sometimes six hours playing NFL games on my phone and watching Mythbusters, which Erik doesn’t approve of.
     “You’re done with screens,” Erik will tell him in the middle of a show. I feel like the kids should get some warning and some notice that they’re going to be cut-off from the life force. He says he knows when enough is enough. We sometimes go to bat for our opposing ideas. Usually, one of us ends up in another room, watching a show with Max, while the other watches a show alone. Zoe, who is obviously on her phone but claiming she’s doing homework, avoids the whole scene.

There is a reason “The Piña Colada Song (Escape)” has two titles. The dream and the specifics of the dream are at odds. Piña Coladas are frou frou drinks, easy to come by. Escape is, at least from yourself or from the planet, not easy at all. The paradox of this song is that love should be easy like a piña colada but it’s complicated, like placing a personal ad while your lover lies in bed next to you. You look around the mini-planet of your bed and you say to yourself, I think these sheets have seen enough of these two’s butts.

The problem with relationships is that you bring yourself to every single one you embark upon. You can leave the relationship but you’ll still be you, singing sad karaoke songs about how you dream there is somewhere to go, but there again, you will still be there. There’s no escape, but that’s OK. There’s no need to escape.

The American dream is really the California dream. health food and yoga spawn for the rest of the country a love/hate relationship to all things Californian. It’s hard to escape the lure of California. California will provide Pinã coladas, champagne, dunes of the cape, and all the half a brains you could want. No one leaves California, as the other, actually bad song about not leaving being able to leave hotels or California goes.

My husband Erik and I got through what I call the vicissitudes, and he calls, “what the fuck are we doing here?” When my mom comes to town, she checks in with me, “Is he still kissing you on the top of your head?” Sometimes. She checks in with Erik, “Are you still kissing her on the top of her head?” To my mom, this is the sign of rising above it all, of being able to handle the ups and downs, of believing in the little details that keep the dream alive. Are details the stuff of dreams? Or do dreams rise above the details—are dreams the way we escape the quotidian?

I am looking out the window from my house in Flagstaff, which is assuredly not coastal California. It snowed a few inches last night and, around noon, the air warms enough that the branches of the Ponderosa trees shrug off their frozen white blankets, tossing them to the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I think the trees are animals—deer or coyote, squirrel or elk. The trees move so much when letting go the heavy snow.
Flagstaff measures its fire danger based on its snow year. So far, this year, we’re looking pretty good. According to the National Weather Service, it has snowed over 44 inches thus far this year, which is a little less than normal by January 10. And last August, the monsoon storms missed us. And in June, a fire came within a mile of the city limits. The snowfall last year was as the same as this year’s—a little less than normal. Far less than record years like in 1967 when it snowed 86 inches in one night. Or even when I first moved here and it snowed 115 inches in a single weekend. Sometimes, Erik doesn’t even bother shoveling even though he prefers a dry and clean parking place. Now, the snow melts more often and more quickly. No ice to worry. Instead of soaking the ponderosas’ roots to the very bottom, the melted snow makes it only to the first layer. The trees are dry and ready to go up in flames. The trees send out a personal ad. “Hey, any other planet out there looking for a few billion trees?”

Piña Coladas are layered drinks. Alrhough they blend nicely, as they sit and you sip, the coconut milk separates from the pineapple juice. A layer of soft white fluff sits atop a watery belly. The best part of the piña colada is the coconut milk which is rare that a drink’s mixer trumps a drink’s liquor. But rum is definitely from the 70s which aligns with the song’s cover album making love in the dunes and getting caught in the rain, but had Rupert Holmes known that a coconut oil/water/milk craze would overrun the 2010s, he may have thought that too akin yoga and health food. He, with foreknowledge, may have rethought naming the song Piña Colada.  
Originally, the lyrics didn’t even mention the Piña Colada. Rolling Stone Magazine, in a reader’s poll that voted “The Piña Colada (Escape) Song” one of the top ten worst songs of all time. But the case against the song actually makes the argument to why the song is one of the best songs of all time: “The lyrics originally went "If you like Humphrey Bogart," at the last minute he changed it to "piña coladas," a drink he didn't even particularly enjoy. The couple in the song both agree to meet at O'Malleys Bar, and don't seem all that miffed to discover they were both trying to cheat on each other. Instead, they discover they both love piña coladas, being caught in the rain and making love at midnight.[i]” Rolling Stone jokes not so much an O’Henry story as an O’Malley story. Other songs on the list include “Feelings” and “You Light Up My Life.” Rolling Stone cites the song “Feelings” for lacking any sort of specificity: what feelings? Whose feelings? And blames Debbie Boone’s song for its genesis: “The song was written as a love song, but Pat Boone's daughter Debby always interpreted it as a song about her devotion to God. The song was written by Joe Brooks, who was arrested in 2009 on charges that he lured 11 women to his apartment with the promise of a movie audition, and then sexually assaulted them. He committed suicide before the case went to trial. Around the same time this was all going down, his son Nicholas was arrested for murdering his girlfriend.” Charging Holmes’ song with the couple trying (and failing) to cheat on each other doesn’t compare with sexual assault and murder. Plus, it was the 70s. Open relationships were coming into vogue—although, not perhaps with people who didn’t like yoga.
If relationships are about liking the same things, Erik and I are kinda fucked. He likes beer. I like wine although neither of us drinks Piña Coladas. I do yoga. He did yoga once, when his mom was in town. I cook, generally using a lot of butter although lately, I’ve been making ancient grain bowls, which might count as a health food. On Saturdays, I sleep in. He usually has his phone. He is not looking at personal ads, as far as I know. I turn toward him. He tells me he’s kicking ass on the Dot Dot game. iPhones will save us from our cheatin’ hearts? Erik reaches over and pats my head. His good morning song. She’s still his favorite. Just a little worn in the grooves. Still, he knows that I like to make the sheets square before I go to bed. He calls me a square for making hospital corners but in the morning, the sheets are organized over us both to which I say, win. And in the morning, I know the name of game he plays.

Holmes sings about the name of the bar where he and his fellow escapee plan to meet. He sings about getting caught in the rain. About champagne. About tomorrow noon and red tape. He brings the specifics about being in love in California in the 70s into specific relief. Admittedly, California has a lot more going on than dunes and capes. Rupert Holmes doesn’t sing about the homeless population. He doesn’t sing about the traffic or pollution. He doesn’t sing about drought or eucalyptus. He doesn’t sing about the Paradise fire which engulfed and destroyed a whole community but he does sing about the plausibility of escape. It is, even on this planet, difficult. The New York Times reported Tamra Fischer’s experience trying to escape Paradise, CA. She drove one direction into traffic with her two deaf and one blind dogs. She waited while she watched house after house go up in flames on Pentz road. She turned to get out of the jam to follow a fire truck. They sped out of town for awhile, only to be stopped by another bumper-to-bumper jam. Imagine sitting in your car as the hill burns beside you. The temperature in the car gets hotter and hotter. The cars don’t move. Your car doesn’t move. And then suddenly, it’s on fire.
“It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce. We live with an unspoken assumption that the planet is generally survivable, that its tantrums are infrequent and, while menacing, can be plotted along some hazy, existentially tolerable bell curve. But the stability that American society was built around for generations appears to be eroding. That stability was always an illusion; wherever you live, you live with risk—just at some emotional and cognitive remove. Now, those risks are ratcheting up. Nature is increasingly finding a foothold in the unimaginable: what’s not just unprecedented but also hopelessly far beyond what we’ve seen. This is a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live. Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the 21st century.”
Tamra gathered her dog and climbed into Larry Laczko’s SUV, two dogs on her lap, one at her feet. They waited. The fire came closer. The paint on Larry’s SUV began to bubble. Larry looked down the ravine to his left. They would tumble. Crash. From above, the flames pointed downward. The winds flicked embers onto the roof of the car.
Thankfully, Joe Kennedy, firefighter and big equipment operator, roared up from the steep bank of the ravine in the bulldozer he had been driving around town to create fire lines. He pushed into the road and then pushed cars into a big graveled parking lot. In the world of climate change, parking lots are escape hatches. A paradox I’m sure Holmes would appreciate—you go to holding space in order to escape.

Since Erik and I have lived in Flagstaff, we’ve watched three major fires from our driveway. The Schultz Fire, the Little America Fire, and the Museum Fire. The road in front of our house provides a bit of a fire line. The driveway itself does as well. And there is one more road between us and the largest contiguous Ponderosa Forest in the lower 48. We scrape our needles from the ground to make a metaphorical moat around our house. A real moat might, in terms of fire, be more effective.
Max trespasses through four neighbor’s yards when he returns from his cul de sac basketball playing. He trudges across the fake moat, which is fine now, it’s winter, with mud and snow stuck to his boots.
“Max, clean it up,” Erik tells him.
He also tells him to take his plate to the sink. He also tells him not to watch a show.
     “You can’t tell him a hundred things to do at once. Pick your battles,” I tell Erik.
“You’re the one saying always saying it’s the details that matter. He just doesn’t pay attention.”
     “He pays attention to his basketball shot.”
“That is true,” Erik says, “He very determined to get his shot.”
     Erik and I met at a bar called the Zephyr in Salt Lake City. We had some things in common: Our dads had both died recently. We both grew up in Salt Lake with Mormon grandparents but non-Mormon parents. We both went to college in the Pacific Northwest.
Before you have kids, these are good, idiosyncratic reasons to get married.
     After you have kids, you don’t get to go to the bar very often. And, one of you will have a higher tolerance for letting the little things go than the other. Or you’ll take turns depending on what the tiny things are. In the Escape/Piña Colada song, the couple does not seem to have kids, which is why they can drink piña coladas, champagne, and have sex on the beach.

I conducted a survey for the Piña Colada. I set it up entirely without any oversight from the university’s Institutional Review Board. Facebook did not deem the song or the survey reproachable, so it counts as science. The song itself may count as science, since the song makes plain this basic fact: there is nowhere to go, so you might as well stay here. In the survey, many respondents, who shall remain unnamed but also might be competing in this March Badness against me so biased though their answers may be, thought this song was not romantic. But I shall show that this song is the most romantic and hopeful song that ever could be written and is thus, not only not bad, but great and insightful. This song is transformative, which makes it real art. The song shows the speaker transformed, which makes it plain real.
When I asked my respondents about the making love on the beach, I received nearly unanimous responses: almost as much as our speaker isn’t into yoga or health food, my Facebook friends are not into Sex on the Beach (the act, not the drink). Too much sand has an exfoliating effect on most sensitive skin, they claimed. My aunt responded that she likes to have sex on the beach, but with a blanket. My Aunt Sue is pretty good at TMI. Perhaps the dunes of the cape provide a little extra privacy, if not extra protection.
Erik and I spent a week on the coast of Washington when we first started dating. We also spent a week on the coast of New Zealand last month. I can’t remember the degree of exfoliation from that first coastal experience but I still have sand fly bites from the second.

It was only a week after we left New Zealand that the information began to flow in from Australia. The numbers are worse than the Camp Fire. As of today, they estimate 1.25 billion animals have died. An area the size of Maryland, for we who can only empathize with the landscape of the U.S. In the town of Mallacoota, residents escaped to the beach. But once you are on the beach, the only place to escape further is the water. The ocean is our largest moat but humans can only swim for so long. Fortunately, the Australian Navy rescued the people trapped on the beach. The evacuees will be taken 16 hours down the coast to Western Port, from where they can see which way the fire will come. They can smell the smoke, but the sight of a fire 16 hours away and 4 minutes away a least allows them to breathe. To plan their next escape even though, eventually, they’ll run out of places to go.

There’s something a little claustrophobic about fire and love and Piña Coladas. They are thick and cloying. They stick to you—your skin, the top of your head, your tongue and your waist. But move down the coast a bit and you will find that beer is a little sticky too. And so is smoke. And, love may look more like a swing dance over here or a hike over there or a tree planting date. But fire, and smoke, and love, and drinks, Piña Colada or otherwise, pervade. The details may change but the basic planet of love stays the same.
The Piña Colada song singer thinks he wants to escape. Things have become a little boring, a little general. The difference between the woman lying in bed next to him and the woman in the personal ad is the difference in the details. The woman in bed has lost her groove. It’s a favorite song but we don’t know which one. She’s just a lady. An old lady. But in the ad, she has all these specificities. She has particular drinks and particular thoughts about health food and particular places and times that she would like to make love. The things shift his vision. There’s no escape because you don’t need to escape when you look at everything with new eyes.

All Erik could see was the dirt and snow Max’s shoes had left on the floor. All I could see was how many tasks Erik had assigned Max all at once. I pointed out to Erik that although Max had left his plate on the counter and tracked snow across the floor and was looking through the house for a screen, that it had been Max, not me, who had shoveled the whole driveway.
“He did? That’s cool. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Thanks for doing that.”
Three phrases and the phase had shifted. I saw Erik in a whole new light. He saw Max differently.
The optometrist harasses me with questions. Which one is better, this one or this one. We go around and around until the focus is the same fifteen times in a row. I have no claims on reality anymore. The optometrist says, “There’s no perfect way of seeing it. Just how you see it.”
I look at Erik. He makes me mad the way he leaves his shoes all over the house. I flip the lens. He did kiss me on the top of my head on his way to work this morning. Maybe he leaves the shoes behind to remind me of his big feet and head kisses.

I admit that the tune of the song, Waaaamp Waaamp Wamp wamp, is a little cloying. Maybe a little claustrophobic making. Not everything about being trapped on the planet not being able to escape nor everything about being trapped in our own personalities in our own relationships is great. Like a song that gets stuck in our head, or like a worn out recording of a favorite song. But remember, we once loved this planet, fires and all. How do you unwear out a recording? You play the song again, maybe with some new attention to the details. We only have one planet. She has a nice curve to her face. Flip the lenses. Change your eyeballs. Look at it differently. You’re still you but you can fall in love again.

Nicole Walker is the author of the collections The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet from Rose Metal Press and Sustainability: A Love Story from Mad Creek Books. Her previous nonfiction work includes Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a book of poems This Noisy Egg. She wishes she'd gone with the original title for her collection of poems, "Comeuppance," so she only had one book with Egg in the title, but like eggs or chickens, the poetry collection came first. 

lisa m. o’neill on “shake your love”

When I think of Debbie Gibson, I think of a very particular scene from my childhood. I can picture my room, a wash of light pink—the flowered wallpaper, the white particle-board desk and bookshelf combo. My legs criss-crossed in front of me, feet encased in slouch socks, I am an island, surrounded by a sea of strewn cassette tapes: Whitney Houston, Taylor Dayne, Pebbles.
And, of course, Out of the Blue by Debbie Gibson. Debbie with her teased blonde bangs and black and white striped shirt. Debbie with her jeans torn precisely at the knee so a face could be drawn there. Debbie with her giant white stuffed teddy bear. Over-the-top sweetness.
Also in the pile is Madonna’s True Blue. In comparison, Madonna is a temptress with gelled and bleached short hair, head cast upwards, her neck, clavicle, and shoulders exposed. Madonna was an aspirational, out of reach, risqué kind of sexy. Debbie Gibson was the kind of girl I could be in a few years. Everything about her accessible: her image, her music, her kind of heart and her kind of heartbreak.
Debbie Gibson songs are firmly planted in the late eighties and firmly lodged in that bubblegum crush, heartbreaks-you-won’t-remember-in-five-years place. These songs were absolutely necessary for my pre-teen self but as I tried to recall each specifically, I couldn’t think of more than four songs from the album I played ad nauseam on my boombox—while applying makeup from my Caboodle and putting on slap bracelets. See what I mean? Lodged in time.
Inside that Caboodle alongside some very questionable eye shadow choices was Debbie Gibson’s signature perfume “Electric Youth,” named after the hit from her second album. Electric Youth came in clear bottle with a black top with green accents and inside the bottle was a hot pink spiral. The perfume smelled like sleepovers with your best friends and staring at your crush from across the cafeteria.
From the time she was twelve, Debbie Gibson wrote hundreds of songs, recording in a pieced-together studio in her Long Island home. “I would line tape recorders up on the ironing board,” she said in an interview, “and I would record the keyboard part on one and I would play it back while playing a live part into another and it was my idea of multi-tracking.” She signed with Atlantic Records when she was still in high school. She wrote all the songs for the album and released Out of the Blue in the summer of 1987, following it up with “Shake Your Love” that fall. When “Foolish Beat” became her first number one single in Spring 1988, she became the youngest artist ever—and to this day the youngest woman artist ever—to write, perform, and produce a number one single (In case you’re curious, Soulja Boy came to share this honor in 2007). By the end of 1988, Out of the Blue had gone triple platinum in the U.S. and in 1989, Gibson was recognized by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, along with Bruce Springsteen, as Songwriter of the Year.
“Shake Your Love” only made it to #4 on the charts. But, of course, #4 on the Billboard Top 100 Chart means it was everywhere. In an era pre-Spotify, pre-Youtube, and even long before Napster or AOL, the radio was your most accessible option for new music. And, of course, there was MTV, founded only six years before.
The same qualities that make good songs very good make bad songs very bad. They have a catchy rhythm and melody, they get stuck in your head, and often, but not always, they’re easy to move to. They stay with you. They come to define a particular time in your life. I would argue that Debbie Gibson’s ballad “Lost in your Eyes” is a good song. It’s timeless and communicates a specific feeling about the nature of humans and hearts. “Shake Your Love,” on the other hand, is a very good bad song.
It’s bad in the way that we will always remember it. It’s bad because it’s an earworm that’s undeniably nostalgic. First songs, first albums, first pop stars, first loves—those are the ones we can’t shake, right?
Do you happen to know how many times Debbie Gibson can’t shake your love? FIFTY-FOUR TIMES. In three minutes and forty-three seconds. That’s a lot of shaking. Or rather, rendered unable to shake.
If that cassette had been a CD or a Spotify playlist, I would have skipped “Shake Your Love” most times. The ceaseless repetition vexed even my eight-year-old sensibilities. Another song that does this to me is the Black Eyed Peas “I Have a Feeling (Tonight’s Going to Be a Good Night)”—not just for the chorus but for that part where they repeat and “do it and do it and do it and do it.” We get it! You’re going to do it! Stop ruining our night!
The official video for “Shake Your Love” took place on a set made to look like an old drive-in. I actually find this video way more satisfying than other music videos from this album. First of all, the upbeat video captures that essence of teenage innocence that Debbie Gibson represented. She’s singing and swaying, she’s sitting in a cool convertible, she’s in a leather jacket (gasp! slightly more rebellious!) while a wind machine very nearly unstyles her hair-sprayed bangs. In her other videos for the album, Debbie looks like she’s oscillating between teenage girl and mid-life divorcee; the fashion of the eighties is partly to blame for that. Massive shoulder pads, French braids, low clip bows, and ankle-length wool coats don’t really communicate “seventeen.” But in this video, she is a teen queen dream.
The video for “Shake Your Love” was choreographed by Paula Abdul, who would soon be famous in her own right for her 1989 debut album Forever Your Girl—for the record, also in my ocean of cassettes.
Debbie doesn’t dance with the others. She will in later videos but in this one, she’s singing and car-sitting while very fast choreography happens around her. That feels appropriate in more way than one. She is providing the soundtrack—albeit a cloying one—to their lives, to mine, to ours.

As I was in the process of writing this essay, I went onto the site Cameo to send a Galentine to a friend. Cameo gathers celebrities together—actors, influencers, aging pop stars—and facilitates fans paying money for their icons to send messages to loved ones. In ways, it’s an online replica of the line for headshot autographs at the end of mall tour dates for Debbie and Tiffany in the eighties.
When I visited the site, the bots immediately informed me that I could buy a cameo with Debbie Gibson for $150. In the video samples, Debbie smiles. She exudes what feels like sincere enthusiasm and warmth. Often, she wears her signature style, hat positioned on the back of the head, never covering the bangs. She sits at a mirrored grand piano that originally belonged to Liberace, with vases of roses and a pair of high heels sitting atop. She talks with affection to Nicole, Jill, and Jaclyn. She wishes Rick a happy 51st birthday and then sings an excerpt of one of her hits—some times with more clarity and tone than others.
As I watched these video messages, I wondered what it feels like to be Debbie. I imagine the extra income is nice, but I am curious about bridging this connecting with fans over the eras. Those of us who were eight years old when the debut album came out are now forty. Our youth has lost its elasticity—and electricity. Is there sadness in singing those same songs over and over to them, or is it a kind of homecoming?
In the summer of 2019, Donnie Wahlberg coordinated a Mixtape Tour that reunited major acts from the late eighties and early nighties: New Kids On the Block, Tiffany, Salt N Pepa, Naughty by Nature, and, of course, Debbie Gibson. I remember being excited when I heard the tour announced, but not enough to make plans or buy a ticket.
Footage from the tour reveals some sweet moments, like a crowd-pleasing duet of “Lost in your Eyes” between Debbie and Joey McIntyre. But in watching then 48-year-old Debbie sing “Shake Your Love,” I feel its age. Not only the time in which the song was produced but those of us it was made for.
We’ve aged out. We’ve grown in complexity. We need different messages. We need less drum machine.
Is it also the hindsight we have as adults of a few relationships we “just couldn’t shake” that we now realize were toxic? A hindsight we simply couldn’t have back then?
Still, there’s a kind of beauty when Debbie kicks her heels off and runs around the stage. In that moment, I see that effervescent seventeen-year-old touring the world for the first time and the thrill of having hundreds of thousands of people singing your song back to you.

Before writing this essay, I hadn’t listened to Out of the Blue since the early 90s. We grow up and out of music so quickly in adolescence. Soon Debbie was replaced by Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morrisette, Pearl Jam and Nirvana.
So many teenage musicians remain ensconced firmly in the time they entered the scene. And in a way, we want them there, firmly rooted in our memories. We resist them growing up. (There are exceptions to this of course—crossovers not from genre to genre but from youth to adulthood. Beyonce one of the best examples, a singer who grew up in the public eye and whose artistry continues to expand. Or the much beloved, but not by me, teen star who grew up to write and perform her own syrupy shake-themed hit.)

In an episode of MTV’s “Where Are They Now” circa 2000, Debbie talks about isolation and her mother discusses the conscious choice the star made to pull away from the fame and reset.
The dilemma of being a “Who’s Who” that steps back from the limelight is that you also become a “Where Are They Now?”
Debbie reinvented herself, becoming Deborah and performing on Broadway like she’d always dreamed. On my first trip to New York when I was eighteen, I remember passing by a Broadway theater and seeing that “Deborah” Gibson was playing Belle in Beauty and the Beast. Her prior role was as another woman I deeply related to as a young person: Eponine from Les Miserables, patroness of young, angsty unrequited love. In 2017, Debbie went on Dancing With the Stories—a pivotal moment, she said in interviews, after suffering chronic health issues from Lyme disease. She DJs her own mixtape show on Sirius FM. Most recently, she was a judge on the Nickelodeon new series American’s Most Musical Family.
In Debbie’s ratings on Cameo, she has a five star rating from 423 reviews (she just can’t shake her fans). In the reviews, “Debheads” celebrate her messages and how much they meant to loved ones: “She must have sung this song millions of times but the greeting and performance were both sincerely and enthusiastically delivered,” “It really felt like she knew and was addressing us personally,” “She clearly cares about her fans”. One review simply reads: “Thanks! She said yes :)”

As you’re reading this, Debbie Gibson has another pop song on the Billboard charts. Her song “Girls Night Out” is at its highest peak so far at #8 on the Billboard Charts the week of March 6, 2020. In the video, filmed in Las Vegas where she currently lives, Debbie tucks herself into bed and then is ushered out of her room by Las Vegas showgirls—down the hall and into a long night of dancing, DJing, and playing the roulette table. At the end, she wakes up and thinks it was all a dream until she finds a rhinestoned heel on her bed and embraces it, falling back into bed. It all really happened.

I think of the Debbie she was and that girl in the pink bedroom pressing rewind on that boombox. I’m not going to listen to that song—unshakeable from memory—for another twenty years if I can help it but, like the best worst nostalgic songs, it reminds me of who I was and I’m glad it exists.

Lisa M. O'Neill is an essayist and journalist who writes about culture, politics, and social change with an intersectional lens. Her writing has appeared in Bitch, Diagram, defunct, GOOD, Good Housekeeping, Everyday Feminism, Salon, and The Washington Post, among others. She is the host and producer of The MATRIARCHITECTS, a podcast featuring change-makers who are building a culture that respects, values, and celebrates women. She’s grateful that although she rocked '80s Debbie Gibson bangs (seen growing out here), her hairdresser talked her out of a perm. @thislisaoneill