The kid is croupy and the boss is bitching and the mortgage is due, and, oh, for the good old days when the most important thing in your life was the release of the new Supertramp album. Which today is a very old Supertramp album, but which you can still buy (and maybe even a sealed copy!) at Memory Lane, our favorite link to our musical past. We travel back to puberty and beyond with every trip to Tempe's 20-year-old treasure trove of old vinyl albums and singles, where just recently we scored a dead-mint copy of Jerry Vale's Arrivederci, Roma (because we were feeling sort of '60s Euro-nerd), a clean reissue of Taboo: The Exotic Sounds of Arthur Lyman (to quench our thirst for something '50s loungey), and an autographed copy of Wham!'s Make It Big because, well, we wanted an aural reminder of simpler times.

We always find our thrill, and a big hunk of our past, at Memory Lane, where the friendly, helpful staff never laughs at our oddball choices -- not even the time we bought three REO Speedwagon platters.