Here's something even more amusing than the usual skate gossip, industry news, etc: A classic 80s shot of your favorite skate blogger, mugging with the old gang circa 1988 at Fadtastic's, a hilariously-named backyard ramp in Brighton, CO that was the first halfpipe I ever dropped in on. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, it is now possible to randomly come across choice shots like this while surfing your old buddies' MySpace pages early in the morning on the day after Christmas.



I'm pretty sure the blonde kid at left lived there, and it's telling that I can't remember his name: A ramp was a ramp, back in 1988, as it is to this day. I'm pretty sure we had to sign a waiver to skate it, too. The rest of the gang, from left to right, is my junior high skate crew: Tim Lara, Mike Reinhardt, Yours Truly, Josh Keane, and Dave Griffin. I still skate and snowboard on the regular with Dave Griffin, and I'm pretty sure his dad Bernie gets both the photo credit and the chauffeur credit on this excursion: Nowadays there are sick concrete skateparks all over Colorado, but back then we thought it was worth a road trip with somebody's dad to get a piece of some PVC coping on a backyard mini ramp we'd heard some kid mouthing off about in a skateshop.


I'll take whatever shit I deserve for the pink shorts, pink plastic rails, backwards cap, standard-issue 80s skater bangs, and general poseurness of this on-deck group shot, but let the record show that I was skating the classic H-Street Matt Hensley board. Some things never change: I'm skating his Deathproof deck from Black Label now, and if you ever see me out skating I promise to do the step-off shifty I learned from watching his part in Shackle Me Not 7 million times at an impressionable age.



Almost entirely unrelated, but also fairly old-school: Peep this circa-1993 footy of Banquet editor/video dude/code monkey/cougar hunter Kyle Kimberling, from 411 vol. 3.