Welcome to the Friday Five, the brain child of Fancy Boys Club creator Brandon Andreasen. Each week, we will give four questions and a top five list for all the Fancy Boys contributors to tell stories and give horrible top five lists for.
This week, in honor of us closing in on our first month as a website, we are doing this week on: Firsts.
1: First Celebrity Crush
Brandon Andreasen: Fiona Apple in the Criminal Video
Michael Grace: Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns. I was like 5
Emily Ramirez: Johnny Depp
Alec Stein: Princess Jasmine. Does she count as a celebrity? I don’t know and don’t care. Seeing her cartoon midriff is the first time I remember something ancient and primal shifting inside me.
Jack Baker: The first one I can remember is Christina Aguilera after the Genie in a Bottle music video came out.
Rick Copper: Diane Lane in The Outsiders. She’s always my ‘go-to’ crush if that’s such a thing.
Katie Keller: First Celebrity Crush- Roberty Downey Jr. I was obsessed with the movie “Only You” my first aim screen name was “OnlyUDowneyJr08” No one told me about all the heroin he was doing at the time.
Jeremy Daniel: Lisa Bonet. Even with the 80’s eyeshadow and the shoulder pads.
Matt Drufke: I’m sure there were earlier crushes, but the first one I can remember right now is Sharon Stone, specifically how she appeared on the Rolling Stone “Hot 1992” cover.
Tim Nemec: My first celebrity crush was the Yellow Power Ranger from the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, but only in uniform. I would come to find out years later that the action footage of them in costume came from a Japanese TV show where the Yellow Ranger was a man.
Kate Peterson: Jonathan Brandis
Alexander Truly: Patty Hearst when I saw the photo of her holding the machine gun. So hot. I masturbated to that for 3 months straight.
2: What was your first date?
Brandon Andreasen: We went and saw Little Nicky and decided our song would be Butterfly by Crazytown.
Michael Grace: Seeing the movie Hitch. It was awful. So was the movie.
Emily Ramirez: Went to the Houston Zoo with a guy I had crushed on for like 2 years. At one point he literally grabbed my by the pussy as a joke. Luckily, even my 13 year old self was good at setting boundaries and he never behaved in an untoward manner after that.
Alec Stein: Going trick-or-treating together, but as part of a larger group. I suggested she go as Princess Jasmine. She didn’t.
Jack Baker: I was really late to the whole dating game. My first real date was in college and we got Chinese. It went fine. Yen Ching became my first date spot for every other girl I dated in college. All one of them.
Rick Copper: Shelly Scharf. We were 16 and went bowling. She had strawberry-flavored lip gloss.
Katie Keller: What was your first date? A “hike” to the man-made waterfall at the front of my family’s subdivision. We held hands. It was off route 34 where there is now a Target.
Jeremy Daniel: My Freshman year of High School I took a girl to a horror movie and jumped 8 times, including one that featured a light shriek. She deleted me on AIM the next morning.
Matt Drufke: In 1994, I took a girl to see “Terminal Velocity”, the film with Charlie Sheen and Nastassja Kinski. My sister had to drive us because I wasn’t old enough.
Tim Nemec: My first date was in middle school with a girl named Taylor Fuller and we went to see Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The movie was awful.
Kate Peterson: Hand to God this is true: I was a junior in high school and my friend’s brother took me to see a band play at a coffee shop in Highland, Indiana. He ended up telling me that he was a legit vampire during dinner. When I pointed out that he was eating a fucking ham sandwich, he decided to prove it by biting a girl in the parking lot (not even me!). I told his sister and her response was to yell at him….about exposing his vampire secret too soon, as it scares people off. This was the PERFECT precursor to my lame af love life.
Alexander Truly: In 1986, I took my science teacher to see a rerelease of Deep Throat on the big screen. It was highly-erotic. Afterwards, we got Thai massages.
3: First CD you ever bought
Brandon Andreasen: AC/DC Live from the Old Sound Investment in Plainfield
Michael Grace: Either Korn’s ‘Follow the Leader or Newsboys’ ‘Love Liberty Disco’. The late 90s were a whirlwind.
Emily Ramirez: Ace of Bass!
Alec Stein: Oof. I bought Smash Mouth’s “Astro Lounge,” and “The Better Life” by Three Doors Down right around the same time, but I can’t remember which was first.
Jack Baker: I don’t remember the first CD I ever bought with my own money, but the first CD I picked out was Backstreet’s Back by The Backstreet Boys. My family was at Sam’s Club and my dad said we could each pick out a CD. I was seven and didn’t know any music other than the Jimmy Buffett cassette my mom had on an endless loop in her minivan. I recognized the cover of the Backstreet Boys CD from a photo in the Scholastic News magazine my class had read earlier that week, so I picked that one. Who would have known I had such great taste in the second grade.
Rick Copper: First CD – Hotel California. Already had it on vinyl, limited edition vinyl and cassette, so why the hell not. It, unlike the vinyl, has totally faded in sound quality over time.
Katie Keller: Jewel’s CD single for “You Were Meant for Me
Jeremy Daniel: 2B A Master: Music from the hot Pokémon TV show. I’ve been known to still recite the PokéRap from time to time if enough alcohol is involved.
Matt Drufke: I was very late to the world of CDs. I was buying cassettes way longer than I should have been. Because of this, the first CD I bought was Foo Fighters’ 1995 self-titled debut.
Tim Nemec: The first CD I ever bought was the Shrek 2 soundtrack bundled with the Shrek 2 film on DVD. Accidentally In Love > All Star.
Kate Peterson: Green Day – Dookie. I played it over and over for many months until my sister finally snapped and set it on fire.
Alexander Truly: Yanni: Live at the Acropolis
4: First time you thought you were gonna die
Brandon Andreasen: I nearly drowned in Maui on vacation more than once
Michael Grace: When I was 10 I was so constipated I thought I was going to die.
Emily Ramirez: When I was 12, we went to a Six Flags waterpark and I swam too far out into the wave pool. When the waves turned on, I almost drowned.
Alec Stein: Growing up, I played with fire an objectively weird amount. Not enough to be classified as some sort of pyromaniac, but enough that if Freud was hearing about this, he would look up from his notes and say “Let’s talk about that a bit longer.” but, you know, in German.
I don’t remember the exact year this occurred, but I was young enough to where I probably shouldn’t have been home alone, but old enough to know what the various warning labels on all the chemicals in my dad’s garage meant.
As the story goes, I was home and hungry one hot Summer’s day, and rifling through the cabinetry at my father’s house, when I pulled out a box of popcorn. I read the microwave instructions on the back and thought to myself “You know, a microwave is basically just fancy kind of fire. I wonder if I could make popcorn by just putting flame to it.”
And that is precisely what I did. At least, in the same sense as if Alfred Nobel thought “I wonder if I could make mining easier by just putting flame to that mountain.” Kind of selling the whole operation a bit short, that is.
I went to the garage, foraged for any bottles and cans that said stuff like “keep away from flame” on them, and manufactured a cocktail of gasoline, WD-40, and anything else that looked like it was stored specifically to be out of my reach.
I did have the foresight to attempt this “experiment” in a controlled area. I decided to place the popcorn and homemade napalm in the culvert that ran under the driveway, that way it would be contained if things went awry.
I would like you to take a moment and think about what this layout reminds you of. A long, cylindrical chamber with a spark and explosion in it.
If you answered “cannon barrel” come on down! You are today’s lucky winner!
I set my popcorn in first, dowsed it in a bit of my concoction, and placed a Gatorade bottle full of the rest on top of it. I took one of those long-reach lighters with a trigger, figuring those extra four inches it provided would be crucial in avoiding a mishap, and lit the popcorn.
If you have already guessed what happened, where the fuck were you twenty years ago to tell me to stop!?
I fireball shot from the culvert and engulfed me. I was on fire from head to toe, running circles around the white sycamore tree in my dad’s front yard, screaming what few obscenities I knew at that age.
I don’t think it lasted long. It couldn’t have, since I was left without any major burns, but I distinctly remember having enough time to envision the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where all the Nazis melt, and thinking that was happening to me.
Instead, the fire subsided sometime in my second or third lap around the tree, and the only major damage was my leg hair was mostly scorched off, and my t-shirt had some pretty clear charred areas.
I tossed the tee shirt out, and then shaved off the rest of my leg hair, during which I recalled that famous phrase “stop drop and roll.” “Perfect.” I thought, “I’ll have to remember that for next time.”
There were several “next times.”
Jack Baker:I was deep into Donkey Kong Country on my Gameboy when I had to pause because my dad’s Land Rover was starting to shake. I looked up to see that we had veered into the grass.
We had just passed the exit for Dollywood on the highway in Tennessee. I remember because my dad had asked if we wanted to go. We did not. Because it was Dollywood.
Sometime between that question and the accident, my dad—forgetting everything he’d taught us when we were children—took a sip of his coffee while also chewing on a Halls Defense throat lozenge. He immediately started choking and passed out soon thereafter.
With my dad passed out at the wheel, we were headed through the grass straight toward the end of one of those highway guard rails at 65 miles per hour. My stepmom frantically yanked on the steering wheel to try and get us back on the highway. It did not prevent us from smashing into the guard rail, but it did ensure that we would roll over twice after impact.
I don’t remember if we ended up right-side-up or upside down, but somehow we were all relatively unharmed.
We never skipped the exit for Dollywood again.
Rick Copper: Death. Damn. There were quite few times when I was a child, but first one that I can vividly recall would be getting run over by a hay wagon when I was 12. Had sweet tire mark bruises diagonally across my torso.
Katie Keller: When I was small I almost drown in the 5” section of a swimming pool on a vacation. My dad kept looking into the water, saying “It’s not that deep, she just needs to move over” eventually my mom jumped in and helped me. My father didn’t realize the “walk it off” mentality didn’t apply to drowning.
Jeremy Daniel: I choked on pizza when I was 3ish. Even though we got off on the wrong foot, pizza and I have since worked things out and pizza has been a big part of my life. In some ways, it’s the ultimate redemption arc.
Matt Drufke: In 1992, my sisters and I went to see Muppet Christmas Carol. We took the family truck and I had to sit in the middle seat (because I was the youngest), and so I only had a lap belt to protect me. On the way back from the theater, we went through a intersection. The only problem was, a vehicle couldn’t fully stop due to some ice and also went through the intersection in a perpendicular fashion. It was a head-on collision and my head slammed into the radio console. I definitely remember thinking right before the collision, “There’s a good chance this won’t end well.”
Tim Nemec: The first time I ever thought I was going to die was when I was 4 years old and I thought I was smart enough to cross the street alone. Cut to me, a few minutes later, almost hit by a car. Ever since then, I learned that mortality was finite
Kate Peterson: My car accident 2 years ago. The car was on fire and I couldn’t get out. Luckily a guy who witnessed the crash ripped my door off, right before the flames got to my steering wheel.
Alexander Truly: I did Iowaska in Peru back in 1997. I shit myself so much and puked so much I thought I was dead.
5: Top 5 first/debut records of all time.
Brandon Andreasen:
Guns N Roses-Appetite for Destruction
The Hold Steady-Almost Killed Me
Little Richard- Here’s Little Richard
The Ramones-Ramones
Beastie Boys-License To Ill
Michael Grace:
Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
Yeasayer – All Hour Cymbals
Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s – The Dust of Retreat
Lauryn Hill – The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Emily Ramirez:
Kings of Leon- Aha Shake Heartbreak
Mariah Carey- Mariah Carey
Vampire Weekend- Vampire Weekend
Radiohead- Pablo Honey (Thom hadn’t quite found his voice yet, but it still got me hooked)
James Blake- James Blake
Alec Stein:
Kanye West – The College Dropout
Dawes – North Hills
The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground & Nico
Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d. City
Colter Wall – Colter Wall
Jack Baker:
MC5 – Kick out the Jams
King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King
Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are you Experienced?
Rage Against the Machine – Rage Against the Machine
Funkadelic – Funkadelic
Rick Copper:
Van Halen – Van Halen
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – (self titled)
Warren Zevon – Warren Zevon
Bruce Springsteen – Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin
Katie Keller:
Pete Yorn – musicforthemorningafter
Something Corporate – Leaving Through the Window
Jason Mraz – Waiting for My Rocket to Come
The Postal Service – Give Up
Sara Bareilles – Careful Confessions
Jeremy Daniel:
Jay Z – Reasonable Doubt
Jay Z – Reasonable Doubt
Jay Z – Reasonable Doubt
Jay Z – Reasonable Doubt
Jay Z – Reasonable Doubt
Matt Drufke:
The Ramones- The Ramones
Weezer – Weezer (Blue Album)
The Beastie Boys – Licensed To Ill
The Clash- The Clash
Kanye West – The College Dropout
Tim Nemec:
Weezer – Weezer (Blue Album)
Paramore – All We Know Is Falling by
Fall Out Boy – Take This To Your Grace
Lizzo – Cuz I Love You
Kacey Musgraves – Same Trailer, Different Park
Kate Peterson:
Beyonce – Dangerously in Love
Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the Wu-Tang
M.I.A. – Arular
PJ Harvey – Too Pure
Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill
Alexander Truly:
Charles Manson – Lie: The Love and Terror Cult
Tyva Kyzy – “setkilemden sergek yr-dyr”
Black Light Burns – Cruel Melody
Miles Davis – Elevator to the Gallows
John Lee Hooker – “Boogie Chillen'” / “Sally May”
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