3/17

carolyn kellogg
on
Toni Basil, “Mickey”

(march fadness 80s edition)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

The most important thing about revisiting this essay is to point out that Toni Basil is a living legend. She was a well-known choreographer before she had her pop hit with “Mickey,” and since this published she’s done plenty—you can see how fabulous she is appearing recently on the Words that Move Me podcast (with video) and talking to the news about choreographing for Tina Turner. She gave Tina Turner her ‘80s dance moves? I mean, come on.

The second most important thing is that Toni Basil’s adorable-to-the-point-of-annoying “Mickey” was up against Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock’s “It Takes Two,” with an essay by David Griffith. “It Takes Two” was so strong that it went on to take the entire tournament, knocking out every one-hit-wonder rival. 

I don’t often talk about my high school experience because boarding school is pretty hard to explain. And I’m still trying to figure out the connections between wealth and class and power that were inculcated— but not taught—there. So I wrote about my awkward teendom instead? Maybe a little relatable. 

But let’s be honest, the legend is far more interesting. 

I still love “Mickey,” full of real high school cheerleaders, with Toni Basil’s irrepressible uncanny valley presence at the center. —Carolyn Kellogg

Oh Mickey You’re So Fine: carolyn kellogg on Toni Basil’s Fadness and the cruelty of the 80s

A hot guy stands with scissors in his hands. He’s at the jukebox, the top open. Usually he uses  the back end of the scissors to push the button that gives us free plays. Not this time. This time, he reaches inside and pulls out a vinyl 45. We are screaming Wait, no, no! behind him. Ignoring us, he puts a point of the scissors to the record and carves a triangle, a circle, a square, again, all the way around. He returns the 45 to its place, closes the jukebox lid, walks away. S follows him but I stay there, reach for my change, drop it in the slot. The needle starts, skips, lifts away. “Mickey” never plays again.
Rewind a little and he had said something like, Please do not play that song again. Or, Stop playing that song. Or, Play that song one more time and see what happens.
Pull the camera back and you’ll see we’re in an ice cream shop, The Latest Scoop, a pun suitable for small town 80s America. Romeo’s, a pizza place, is right next door. Going down the street: banks, the thrift store One Flight Up, the Chocolatier, the Ioka movie theater, an electronics store, a Woolworth’s, further down, the Loaf and Ladle, a ‘70s throwback I can rarely afford.
Pull the camera back and up and up to take in the clusters of brick buildings up the rise. That’s where S and I go to school. There is probably snow on the ground. We’re allowed to come to town, but few people have made the habit of it that S and I have. We’ve been spending a LOT of time at The Latest Scoop. We have played “Mickey” many, many, many, too many, times.

Antonia Basilotta was raised in Las Vegas, the child of a Vaudeville performer mother and orchestra leader father who had a gig at the Sahara Hotel. She did cheerleading at Las Vegas High (this detail will be important later). Jump cut ahead into the 1960s and Toni Basil has begun a career as an actress and choreographer and avant-garde filmmaker, including a short featuring Dean Stockwell. 
She started out dancing on film, in “Robin and the Seven Hoods” (with Frank Sinatra) and “Viva Las Vegas” (behind Elvis). Living in Los Angeles, she did choreography in the dreamy early-mid ’60s — Basil was an assistant choreographer on the music-variety television show “Shindig!” and choreographer on “The T.A.M.I. Show,” the two-day concert released as a single film in 1964. Legendary, iconic pop music.
As the scene started changing, getting trippier and darker, Basil was right in the thick of it, appearing in the delightfully bonkers Monkees movie “Head,” co-written by Jack Nicholson. She was friends with both him and Dennis Hopper, acting in “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces.” She dated Jay Sebring and knew Sharon Tate, both killed by the Manson family in 1969. If there is a little bit of a gap in her biography after this, it might be because things got pretty fucked up. It also could just be that her credit list is so long, the early ’70s don’t make the grade.
By the time I was playing “Mickey” too many times, I was in my second year at the vaunted high school and finally finding my feet, a little. People who came for all four years were exceptional (by our own measure), gluttons for punishment (by everyone else’s), and somewhat doomed (yearbooks recorded the names of all the four-year students who hadn’t made it to graduation, about a third of the class). That I was still there sophomore year—we had a different name for it, like all prep schools, but I’ll translate—that I was still there was a minor accomplishment. 

I’d gotten to school by being one of the smartest in my small New England town—I was never the smartest, but I was, clearly, the most eager to leave. At boarding school, almost everyone there was wicked smart; we openly, vocally compared test scores in the dining hall. During my classes, I was still considered good at math, but otherwise, I was middle of the pack. If I was lucky. 
On the first day of French class, Monsieur V started by asking us to introduce ourselves and—I’m not sure if this was according to his prompt, or just how the answers started coming back—how long we’d spent in France. An annual visit. Grandparents in Paris. Every other summer. Just got back. Did I mention this was in French? It was in French. 
I had never been to Paris or Europe or even Canada. My one semester of smalltown junior high French was barely enough for me to follow the conversation, let alone keep up with the coursework. I didn’t give up, I just sucked. A few months in, Monsieur V called on me to read a homework exercise aloud in class, which I realized I’d gotten entirely wrong. There were I think 12 sentences, all to have been executed properly. He made me read the first and then correct my own errors, live. He did not call on another student. I had to read the next sentence, fixing it, and then the next, and the next. By the end, I was weeping. I don’t think he thought it was cruel; I just needed to see that I was not meeting expectations.
I was no longer anywhere near the smartest. But I hadn’t left. I started my second year in the fall of 1982. I made some cool friends. I joined a preppy sport. I did theater. The pieces didn’t fit together all that well—my persona was malleable. Scrawny obnoxious teen, I guess.

The single “Mickey” by Toni Basil was released in May of 1982 in the U.S. and the video caught fire, with Basil, a 38-year old uncanny valley cheerleader, surrounded by actual teenage cheerleaders, outdancing them all, wearing a mask of glamor makeup, gloriously kitschy, playful, fun. Incredibly, she’d made the video before MTV was a twinkle in the eye of basic cable. 
Basil recorded “Mickey” for a British label, Radialchoice. It was a gender-flipped a cover a glammy 1979 pop song, “Kitty” by British band Racey. In some ways, the two songs sound a lot alike—but they don’t really, because Basil added those cheerleading chants: “Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind. Hey Mickey! Hey Mickey!” Brilliant. There’s also an amped-up beat with the stomping, clapping cheerleaders. Basil turned a simple pop song into an unforgettable anthem.
In “Mickey” lore, there are slightly different versions of what happened next. Either her British label asked for, or Basil decided to create, a video to promote the song, because European late night was playing this kind of thing, or because Basil wasn’t going to tour live—something like that.
As a choreographer, Basil had been toying with the idea of doing something with cheerleaders. She was struck by how much cheerleading had evolved since she’d been one in Las Vegas 20 years earlier. (Although she could still fit into her uniform—she’s wearing it in the “Mickey” video.) Although the British label was nonplussed, not having cheerleaders in England, Basil was far away in Los Angeles. “The record company was in England and they barely ever showed up,” Basil told Lyndsey Parker at Yahoo Music last year. “They sent me money and said, ‘Have a great time, man.’” 
She knew what she wanted. She got members of the Carson High champion cheerleading squad to perform in the video with her. Basil conceived, choreographed and directed the music video for “Mickey.” Against a white background, six cheerleaders do tricks around Basil, who sings (well, lipsyncs), kicks, turns, and dances. 
In the 1970s, Toni Basil had teamed up with Don “Campbellock” Campbell, a dancer who’d performed on Soul Train, along with several others, to form The Lockers, a street dance troupe. They booked live shows and TV gigs, from The Carol Burnett Show to Saturday Night Live, popularizing locking as a dance form. You’re not imagining things—Basil is locking in the “Mickey” video.
“Oh Mickey you’re so pretty you don’t understand,” Basil sings, “you take me by the heart when you take me by the hand.” Basil is calling him pretty. She’s inverting the power dynamic. “It’s guys like you Mickey. Oh what you do Mickey, do Mickey, don’t break my heart Mickey,” she sings, turning the lyrics of a kind of rapey song into something that’s teasing, a game where she’s in charge. Those chants! Those cheers! Hey Mickey!
The record label Chrysalis picked up “Mickey” for its American release, because it was getting British airplay, after hearing the import single played on local radio, or possibly both.
Basil gives delightful and candid interviews but I have not been able to pry loose from any of them exactly how the video for “Mickey” found its way to MTV. 
The network famously launched in August of 1981, but wasn’t widely available. “Mickey” as a single was released in May 1982, and hit #1 on the Billboard charts seven long months later, the week of December 11, 1982. MTV most definitely propelled “Mickey” to its spot at the top of the radio charts, a video made before the network existed that was a perfect distillation of what people watching wanted. 

It is laughably impossible to try to explain how hard it was to see music videos in those days. My parents didn’t get cable until 1986. Not that they refused to pay for it—it physically didn’t go that far. 
But somehow in the small town where I went to boarding school, cable made it as far as the electronics store. I try to imagine what the owner was thinking: he sold TVs, he sold stereos, of course he should sign up for cable. Maybe—I could be inventing this, but maybe—there was a wall of TVs with TVs tuned to different stations, playing video cassettes, and he put the cable on one. Did he tune in to MTV? Somebody, some student, stopped to watch. I think I remember that, standing on the floor, watching.
What I know for sure is the store had a listening room, a glass-walled room in the back for showcasing high end stereos and speakers. And very soon, in what I now realize was a kind of miracle, the electronics store owner moved a TV into that glass room and turned it to MTV. There were no chairs in the room. That was fine with me. I sat on the floor for hours. For hours and hours and hours. I knew the names of the DJs and loved “99 Luft Ballons” in German and realized if they teased a new video premiere in the next hour, it would come in the last 3 minutes. I was mesmerized. Other people came and went, but a lot of times I was there the longest.
I had my homework with me. I did try to pay attention to it.
The chronology, I know, is all mashed up, old memory style. I probably saw “Mickey” when it was first being broadcast on MTV—I’m assuming they had it on heavy rotation in the fall of 1982, before it charted. I fell immediately in love like I fell for all kinds of new music, new wave music, music that was fast and loud and got as far as my remote corner of the culture. But I don’t know for sure when the electronics store implemented their teen-friendly MTV room. 
Why on earth did the owner do it? Maybe it was kind of a Hail Mary. He started selling records, and I bought some, when I could. I had to save up. 

I was earning I think $2.15/hour at a time but maybe less, working in the dishroom in the dining hall on campus. It was a messy job that left you either splattered with food left on the trays coming in, or blasted by scalding water from the dishes coming out. It was one of the few, possibly only, jobs left to kids like me who didn’t qualify for financial aid, but otherwise would have no way to buy snacks or do laundry in town or play a video game. There weren’t a lot of us. Most people had allowances.
S, who had come to school as a sophomore, was not wealthy but had an allowance, I think. She’d come from a small town upstate and as ’82 became ’83, as we were listening to “Mickey” too much, she was on a solid trajectory from “newcomer” to “pretty and popular.”
With my friend S, I didn’t spend time in the stereo store but down the street at The Latest Scoop. The shop had ice cream, the jukebox, and a Ms. Pac-Man arcade game. And two brothers.
The hot guy worked at The Latest Scoop—he had strong shoulders and muscles that would flex when getting ice cream and dark hair and a mullet, god bless him. He was gruff with us at first but warmed up. And he was joined by his cute younger brother—smaller, flatter hair, a mean edge. The longer we spent there, the nicer the hot guy was, popping open the jukebox and giving us free plays.
S was more mature than me—I know “mature” is a code word for boobs, which she had, but she also had a self-possessed sexuality. This was all the more improbable because she looked like a grown-up Little Orphan Annie: tight red curls, turned up nose, freckles. A weirdly sexy adult Little Orphan Annie. (Ugh, that’s probably a porno). I was still gawky, obnoxious.
At some level I knew I was a cover, a ruse—S needed someone there while she flirted with the hot guy, as if it was my idea to get all that ice cream or visit the brother who was not amused by me or play endless games of Ms. Pac-Man (which, to be fair, I got quite good at). She would officially deny it, but the hot guy was S’s boyfriend.
So when we had that argument about “Mickey,” when we (really me) had been playing it over and over on purpose because I loved it but also to be annoying, when the hot guy took it and destroyed it, it wasn’t about the record. He didn’t really care about the song or that I was obnoxious, things he’d been tolerating for a while. It’s that he was losing S. If she’d been singing that song to him before, she wasn’t anymore. S was moving forward on her popularity continuum, and that didn’t include dating him. 
What I didn’t understand then, what took me years to understand, was that what I was missing—in French class, in finding a grubby job, in the path I took through the school—was privilege. I had enough to get there, but not enough to fit. 
S understood it, or at least intuited it. When you get to boarding school, level up. Don’t get a job—get invites to richer families’ summer homes, ski vacations, Park Avenue parties. The hot guy would have been a catch in her hometown. Here, he was just a townie. 

“Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind. Hey Mickey! Hey Mickey!” Because she had worked on the Monkees movie Head, some people have assumed Toni Basil’s “Mickey” is drummer Mickey Dolenz. She says it is not (Wikipedia refuses to believe her).
And she knows what some people are thinking when they hear the lyric “So come on and give it to me, any way you can / Any way you wanna do it I’ll take it like a man.” “People also think ‘Mickey’ is about butt-fucking!” Basil told Vulture in 2012. Basil says, “NO! That’s ridiculous. Everyone reads shit into everything. It’s not about anything dirty.”
In addition to her iconic pop hit, Basil’s long career in choreography has probably imprinted you more than you realize. Collaborations with the Talking Heads and David Byrne, Bette Middler, Tina Turner, David Bowie, choreography in American Graffiti, That Thing You Do, Legally Blonde and Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood. She’s won stacks of awards. She lives in Los Angeles and still dances every day. 

Carolyn Kellogg is a writer, lover of old houses and former books editor of the LA Times. She recently moved from upstate to New York back to Los Angeles, and found out she’ll be getting a research fellowship at the Huntington Library.