Those were the days

Since this week MTV ended their 10+ year run of TRL (that's "Total Request Live", mom), took 3 hours to play snippets of 10 videos, and will spend the next few weeks reminding us of how awesome it was, I decided to take a moment to share some of my own reflections.

I remember when TRL was on at NIGHT (not after school? gasp!). The year was 1997. Carson Daly's ego wasn't inflated to the size of Texas. Hanson was still popular. And TRL was some low budget show that MTV seemingly haphazardly threw on the air to see if it would catch on with the tween market...and did it ever.

However, even most die hards do not remember the early days of TRL when there was no studio. There was no set. There was no going to the MTV window to wave at screaming fans in Times Square. There was only Carson Daly alone in a black room announcing a countdown of videos that were actually based on your votes. In those renegade days, there was no fancy website to tally votes. I remember typing out my vote and emailing it the old fashioned way through good ole AOL. I pity the intern who had to sit there tallying those things. With the recent TRL buzz in light of the finale, I've brought up these glory days of programming in conversation with many musically in-the-know friends. No one else seems to remember Carson's black room. Maybe I'm just really die hard...or maybe I was a bad-ass 7th grader simultaneously on the honor roll AND shrooms, and Carson's black room was all in my head.

Another memory I must share is when I actually had the opportunity to be in the live studio audience at TRL (a right of passage for any good teeny-bopper). It was my freshman year of college, and for the first time in my life I was living merely a short train ride away from New York city and the place where celebs gathered, MTV studios. My friend Lauren and I skipped English class (what did I tell you, I'm bad ass) to stand in the cold in hopes of being granted admission to the TRL studios to get a glimpse of one of out favorite stars, Clay Aiken. We came, we saw, we got hugs from the Gayken (eep omg ahhhh!)...and then I grew older and wiser and realized that he was in face, "unavailable".

All of these memories do hold a dear place in my heart so thank you, MTV, for those glory days when you actually played videos and brought joy into a young Claymate's heart. I was truly there for the beginning...and being that I managed to sit through the 3 hour live finale I can now say I was there at the end.