how to meet girls at record collectors conventions

BACK IN THE ’90s, when I was pub­lishing record col­lec­tors price guides with Krause Pub­li­ca­tions, I started working on a book ten­ta­tively ti­tled INTRODUCTION AND GUIDE TO RECORD COLLECTING. I in­tended it to have 100 mini-chapters on var­ious as­pects of collecting—from learning to iden­tify orig­inal press­ings and knowing the dif­fer­ence be­tween a re­pro­duc­tion and a bootleg, to how-to’s on buying and selling at col­lec­tors conventions.

It was to be one hun­dred mini-chapters be­cause 1) I wanted it to be an easy book to pick up and read any chapter in a few min­utes, and 2) be­cause so many col­lec­tors seem to have dif­fi­culty reading any­thing but the en­tries in a price guide.

The first chapter that I wrote was Chapter 69, be­cause it was the eas­iest (and I thought the fun­niest). It was going to be about the lack of fe­males in the hobby of record collecting.

Here it is in its en­tirety be­tween the two hor­i­zontal lines:

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Chapter 69

How to Meet Girls at Record Col­lec­tors Convention

You don’t.

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On the se­rious side, Chapter 70 would have been sug­ges­tions on how guys selling records at shows should be­have to young women looking through their records. This meant girls who were ob­vi­ously not just there with their boyfriends, but ac­tu­ally col­lecting records.

I heard a lot about this from those young ladies be­cause: 1) I was al­ways there with a fe­male com­panion, 2) I was usu­ally per­ceived as “older” than most of the other sellers, and 3) my Mommy and my Daddy raised me to be so damn po­lite all the time!

Those fac­tors made me seem ‘safer’ than the younger males at the shows. So sev­eral of these ‘girl’ col­lec­tors opened up to me: mostly they com­plained about the treat­ment they re­ceived from other (male) sellers.

You know, they were arsewholes . . .

Oh well and that’s that and that was then and this is now and this is all of that book that I have remembered!

PS: Being record col­lec­tors, we all thought that if any girls showed up, they would look like Betty Page or Farrah Faw­cett or Nicole Kidman . . .

Nicole Kidman as the sexy-as-all-getout (never un­der­stood that phrase in­tel­lec­tu­ally but al­ways got it on other levels) witch in Prac­tical Magic, a fun movie that also stars Sandra Bul­lock  as the less glam­orous sister witch. These two are backed up by Stockard Chan­ning and Di­anne Wiest as their auntie witches and Aidan Quinn as a good guy cop. Check it out, if only to see Ms Kidman as a redhead . . .