Although I sing very badly, I have always loved music and have always listened to music, both good and not so good. Music has been my companion in happy, sad, melancholic, fun, and romantic moments. But if I had to talk about a favorite musical era, it would undoubtedly have to be the 80s. I was born in '73, so my adolescence, that stage when hormones, curiosity, and rebellion are at their peak, was precisely during that decade, listening to music, dancing, going to parties, and experiencing my first romantic encounters.

First things first, so if I have to talk about music that I danced and listened to, and that also made me scream, I have to talk about Menudo, a Puerto Rican group that was all the rage among teenage girls in those years. Even though I was very young, I remember that my sisters and I knew all the songs and, of course, all the dance moves. We had our entire room plastered with Menudo posters that came with the music magazines of the time.

As a teenager, Venezuela, my country, was visited by famous groups from around the world. They performed in concerts and on television programs. Television played an important role in the lives of young people, and MTV, the first music channel, had been created. I remember that one of the bands that had the biggest impact on me was Hombres G, a Spanish group that made us dance to rock music at parties. I remember that when the music played, we didn't need partners because we all went out dancing in the middle of the dance floor, jumping and singing along to the songs.

The 1980s were the era of minitecas, which were a kind of traveling disco. People would spread the word about where a particular miniteca would be, and that's where we young people would go. The idea was to dance, flirt, and have a good time. Many of the genres were danceable, such as merengue and salsa. I listened to, sang, and danced to this type of music, and the boys took advantage of it to declare their love, whispering in my ear while we danced. Gitana is a special song because it was the first time a boy declared his love for me, but obviously I said no because I was too young. Hahaha

Living in a Caribbean country, dance music was a staple at every party. We young people had musical partners who knew how to lead us on the dance floor. I liked (and still like) dancing salsa, but Dominican merengue became famous in the 1980s with Wilfrido Vargas, Las Chicas del Can, Sergio Vargas, and others, and we young Venezuelans began to move our hips to the sound of merengue.

Of course, I also listened to music in English, and dance music was all the rage. But if there was one artist I loved and imitated, it was Madonna. Not only did I copy her dance moves, I also tried to dress like her: with bandanas on my wrists and in my hair; crucifixes around my neck and as earrings; dark tights and plastic bracelets. In short, she was my idol.

If I say that television played an important role in my musical tastes, I must also mention cinema. At that time, I saved the allowance my parents gave me for recess, just to buy magazines and go to the movies. The soundtracks of some films were so fundamental that I still can't listen to certain pieces of music without remembering the films. In 1987, when I was about 14, the movie Dirty Dancing was shown in a cinema that no longer exists. I remember that my older sister had to lend me her ID card so that I could get in because it was for people over 15. With the entire soundtrack of that movie, a group of us guys did a choreographed dance for that year's carnival. Like in the movie, I remember sneaking out to rehearse, and when we performed, we did so well that my parents were happy and didn't scold me.

They say that remembering is living, and if those memories have their own soundtrack, they are experienced more intensely, felt more deeply, as if they were a time machine.