Three Apples: Armenia’s Road to the European Union is Paved with… Apricot Stones?
BY PAUL CHADERJIAN It’s 1980 in the Tower District of Fresno, and what kids do in this neighborhood is get into gang fights, smoke cigarettes, and skip school. What I used to do was listen to the radio and hand write my own newspapers. Like many of you, I developed a taste for pop music early in life, and songs became personal sign posts as I navigated through life. Where were you when you heard “Billie Jean is not my lover?” When I hear Adiss Harmandian, I think of my dad taking me to Adiss’ record store in Bourj Hammoud to buy vinyl 45’s. Back then, lyrics didn’t get any better than: “Char lezooneri havadatz eem yareh, artzoonknerov letzvets sev sev achereh.” Now when I hear “Summer lovin’ had me a blast, Summer lovin’, happened so fast,” I remember my friend, the late-Mary Sahatjian, who gave me a copy of the Grease motion picture soundtrack on a cassette tape in 1976. I spent months playing the album on my shoe-box-sized cassette-recorder that my aunt Sirvart bought me so I c...