So Not Your Fool.

Year: 1986

Song: “Nobody’s Fool” by Cinderella

We’re going to jump ahead a couple years to celebrate the joy that is East Coast glam metal. Not every band sprouted out of the puddles of Aquanet and Jack Daniels dotting the Sunset Strip, you know. Cinderella comes to us from Philadelphia, which means it’s okay to have a dark-haired lead singer.

“Nobody’s Fool” appears to be a continuation of “Shake Me,” except with more plot and a lot more philosophical questions of being and time. In “Shake Me,” this girl can’t go to the Cinderella concert because she hasn’t finished her chores and her stepsisters are all “haha we’re gonna go backstage and you’re not.” But then her Cinderella poster magically turns her into a badass metal chick and she catches lead singer Tom Keifer’s eye.

It almost sounds like a fairytale. 

“Nobody’s Fool” picks up from there, except we’ve got a bit of a Darren from Bewitched situation going on with Cinderella the Person.

The groupie stepsisters are still trying to meet Cinderella the Band and they know just what they need to do it.

This is almost definitely a metaphor, reminding Cinderella the Person that her time in the spotlight is but temporary. Still, groupiedom is a lost art.

They realize they’re following Cinderella the Band’s limo, which contains none other than Cinderella the Person. She follows her beau Tom and the rest of the band to a soundstage and slaps on a smile that says I definitely thought this was a date and when he said ‘come check out this jawn’ I definitely thought he meant like, his hotel, not a music video shoot. Dammit, the jawn giveth and the jawn taketh away. 

That eye roll doesn’t lie.

She keeps checking the clock because, being Cinderella the Person, the spell is going to break at midnight, and while there aren’t any pumpkin coaches involved, she definitely isn’t going to be a baller metal chick once the clock strikes and she doesn’t want Tom to see her looking like a square.

The answer to this apparently is to run home, which, I’m not gonna lie, seems a little hasty, but maybe she’s been on a lot of dates that turn into just watching a dude’s band play and she doesn’t want to waste her SPIDER WEB TOP on that. I wouldn’t either.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot going on onstage. Jeff LeBar is carrying on the Eric Carr Memorial Happiest Guy in the Band torch beautifully. Don’t you just want to take a nap in his hair? And Eric Brittingham is vamping hard in a top I would definitely borrow.

And then there’s the set… On an episode of That Metal Show, Human Treasure Tom Keifer describes situation as “they didn’t tell us it was going to look like Mars with newspaper flying around.” Nothing says video-within-a-video like Mars with bits of flying paper.

Ever the consummate professionals, though, the debris doesn’t keep them from performing guitar tricks like this:

I could watch that forever.

Midnight comes and Cinderella the Person finds herself back in regular old nightgown. But she realizes that if you really love someone, you can’t be afraid to let them see you wearing something other than leather and black lace and also you listen to their band play for longer than three minutes.

Back at the soundstage, Tom is fighting is own battles.

Same, dude. Same.

I guess at some point all their fans figured out this was where the music video was happening because Cinderella the Band exits to a mass of people and the groupie stepsisters are chasing down Jeff, Eric, and Fred Coury but they just miss them climbing into the limo. Even though they are wearing time hats. Chew on that for a moment.

Cinderella the Person clusters among the rest of the fans, looking like a normal woman instead of a metal goddess, but that doesn’t matter. Tom Keifer would recognize that face anywhere. See, he loves her for her and not for her spider web top, even though a duplicate would be worth going through multiple internet backchannels to procure. They share a look that suggests they will be jawning jawns all over this fair jawn.

So the takeaway is either don’t let time rule your life or that time will never be in control or maybe that you can’t control time…something like that (which is good since time has clearly not been on my side re: the upkeep of my music video musings). In fact, I’m not even sure the groupie stepsisters are real. They’re probably a manifestation of Cinderella the Person’s insecurities, or perhaps even Cinderella the Band’s concern that people won’t take their music seriously because they are so dang pretty and share a name with a fairytale, despite how hard they rock.

Basically, Cinderella the Band was way more metaphysical than anyone gave them credit for and we are all groupie stepsisters in time hats.