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Reminiscence By Cindy Rae When a nation eats its young, there are few
survivors. And when the young go as willing sacrifices (as the young
regularly do), there are fewer still. Living through the 80's was one
thing. Surviving it with your soul intact was quite another. The eighties, like most other decades, were a
strange and unique time. The Flower Children of the sixties had assured
us that Love could be Free and drugs were Mind Expanding, and Real Music
was a thing shoved through an amplifier at ear drum-shattering decibels. Our poets were either dead, or writing for
Fleetwood Mac, and Heart, and Bon Jovi, and U2; our artists were working
for the special effects division of Twentieth Century Fox; the Berlin
Wall was still up; and all our defenses were down, shattered by the
notion that the future, all our futures, was a 'slick' place. You can't just 'jump' into 1987, you have to lead
up to it, and get the taste of that decade in your mouth. It shimmered
with quianna and platform heels, and mirror balls, in the beginning, and
we were told to dance more and think less. And we did. Rachel Carson had told us we were killing the
planet, and we believed her, while we ignored her. (Silent Spring
was written much earlier, but it was gaining ground, and wide
acceptance, in the seventies, and the ideas from that were bleeding into
the eighties.) We were told we had to save the planet. We could
barely save the rent, some months. Darn. We might not be able to save the rivers, or the
air, or the whales, but we could look fabulous in a black wrap skirt,
and ridiculously high heels, to compensate for being born short. We
needed big earrings, to go with our big hair, and we wore multiple
chains, to go with our low necklines. It was tough to wear clothes that
were both baggy and sleek at the same time. But we were trying. We needed 'designer jeans' to go with our
designer lives, and Led Zeppelin soared, while the echoes of Alvin
Tofler and Future Shock made us afraid that population was a
ticking time bomb, while Sylvia Plath had a horrible solution
(just kill yourself) for that.
Damn. We suspected all of them might be a little wrong (and we really
hoped Sylvia and Alvin were, though both were brilliant, in their way),
but we had no real argument to refute them. It's tough to know who's right, when both your
sages and your idiots are telling you that life is either not worth
living, close to done, anyway, or just plain unimportant in the big
picture. It's hard to find 'Of Love and Hope' in that
landscape, either literally or figuratively. The population itself was
going to kill the population itself, as we all starved, wholesale, from
there being too many of us. Newborn babies. Blessings or curses? Anyone?
Anyone want to field that? You had to be there. It was a time. Just keep
dancing, and pray we can all live through it. There was an almost manic
silliness to it, at times. MTV was glitz on steroids, and Madonna was its
queen. It's tough to think about being someone's true love when jewelry
telling you to be a 'Boy Toy' is sold in stores. Like a Virgin, Madonna?
Really? (It's not that music was bad, necessarily. Much of it honestly
wasn't, at the time. But the message about the lifestyle was devastating
to anyone with a heart. Even Heart.) I think we all despaired of finding a meaningful
love. It was hard enough to find a meaningful job, or a decent
flaw-concealing foundation. True Love? Really? I'll put it on my 'to do'
list. Which was increasingly long. We were compensating for all our flaws, back
then, and we were told rigorously that we had to fix all of those.
Vehemently. Now. The Self-Help Movement became the Self-Obsessed
Movement, and Rachel could just shut up and go save an eagle somewhere.
She was middle-aged, anyway, wasn't she? Madison Avenue sold us the slick life, and its
rhythm was a pounding drum machine. Statuesque models who binged and
purged to hold on to their living told us to look like them, and we
suspected we should, even though that was impossible. Fifteen-year-old
girls sold us jeans we couldn't fit into, if you had hips, and 'Heroin
Chic' was a look. You're in a tough room when being an addict is
considered cosmetically desirable. Not many people were talking about love, then,
though they were all talking about sex, loudly enough. (Sex, drugs, and
rock 'n roll. It was on all our tee shirts, in one form or another.) We sang about love, a lot, but I'm not sure if we
felt it very much, or knew how to find it. It's tough to do that when
you're being taught you might just want to despise yourself, a little
more, for not being perfect. Or perfect enough. You can never be too
rich, or too thin. Apologize for being here; you're using up the place.
Well, damn.
Cosmopolitan told us that now was
the time we could have The Best Sex Ever and with multiple partners, and
this was a good idea, as long as you didn't contract something that
would kill you. Oops. And Cosmo
subtly (and then unsubtly) assured us that you were a failure if you
weren't having multiple orgasms with these people you barely met. Darn.
Vogue told us that our other
goal was to have as many pairs of shoes as Imelda Marcos, or And we did. Folk singers struggled, while synthesizers and
amplifiers ruled, and techno pop (and pap) shivered hard, as the vets
from Vietnam, the generation that told us we could trust no one over
thirty, and definitely no one over forty, went firmly over thirty. And
over forty. It is hard to know what to do with yourself, when
you damn yourself in your twenties. That's okay. We were all doing that, pretty much.
Even those of us who were still in their twenties when 1987 came
around. The youth movement owned us, and it was a sin to
have hair with any grey, or skin with any imperfections, or breasts that
didn't overfill a cup. If you were older, you were supposed to look
young. If you were young, you were supposed to look perfect. And you
were supposed to be able to do that while sporting a casual drug habit
and casual sex partner. Partners. Whichever. Robert Palmer assured us he was 'Addicted to
Love' while backed up by a (very slick) bevy of interchangeable women.
It was a cool video. They all were. Well, most of them were. It's okay,
kids, it's not what you feel like, it's what you look like. We have
pills to fix what you feel. But ain't much gonna hide that tummy flab,
or any other physical flaws you might have. So, get to stepping. You, too, can be 'Addicted to Love.' Because this
is the eighties, and addictions were the norm, of one kind or another.
Liquor. Shopping. Drugs from casual to hard, and relationships the same.
Everybody had an addiction. Everybody had two. And if you didn't have
two, you weren't trying. It might have been a rule that you had to have
as many bad habits as you had marriages, in See what I mean by 'eating our young’? Ah, the age of "If everybody screws up, nobody
gets to be the judge." Ann Landers was getting older sounding by the
minute, and peer pressure was an anvil down in the trenches. Down in the
eighties, if you were in your twenties, or thirties. Daytime talk shows
explored taboo subjects with a kind of mad glee. I think we were all
supposed to be in therapy for something. Doctors prescribed pills to fix
our moods, if we were deemed un-cheerful for too long. Five minutes was
too long, in the eighties. We were very impatient with ourselves. Ouch. Thoughtful women had little value. Glitz did.
Hair had to be permed, flipped upside down, and blown dry, and yes, I
did. (Then I had to take scissors to it, because the damage was past
salvaging.) Vincent wasn't the only one with an unruly mane. We all had
one. Only ours didn't look sexy. It just looked shattered. Nobody told
us that was going to happen, when we tried to look like our rock stars
or our actresses. Dang.
Woman's
Day and
Ladies Home Journal assured
us that in the middle of our forty- to fifty-hour work week, we still
had time to bake perfect cupcakes, or sew perfect throw pillows. Those
dinosaurs. We could have it all, we were told, and we
should. Consume, consume, consume. Jog. Run. Run harder. We were all
training for the Olympics, and like a soap opera doyenne, couldn't wear
the same thing twice, for any of it. We had stuff in our closet from
‘Annie Hall,’ (Catherine even wore it once,) next to the old stuff from
‘Saturday Night Fever,’ piled on top of the old stuff from Olivia Newton
John telling us we had to get physical and join a gym. Thanks, Olivia.
(And no, you couldn't just 'throw the stuff out.' You'd spent a fortune
for it.) Damn, we were hard on ourselves. And the 80's rolled along. Televangelists told us they could save our souls.
Faith could now be had on a TV screen. Then, one blessed night in 1987, it actually was. In the middle of the Madonna age, it was easy to
miss the Vincent and Catherine age. But there it was. Love was an emotion, and couldn't be bought from
a store. It wasn't in your wrinkle cream, or at your beautician's. You
could go to those places, if you wanted, and that was fine, but you
wouldn't find love there. Turns out you had to go down to the Tunnels for
that. Deep places. Low places. Secret places. If there was ever a better
metaphor for where you needed to go to find what was truly important, in
your heart, I don't know what it was. The deep places in your soul, the ones that had
been truly starving, the ones you were trying to feed with all the wrong
stuff, and none of the right stuff, now had a place to go, and make you
sit, and make you listen. Poetry moves the soul. That's why people still
quote it, three hundred years and more, after it was written. Music can
be sad, or uplifting, or incandescent, not just loud. Art is made by
talented people whose hands move to an unseen vision, and love is... Love is everything. And everything is everything. There was hope for Catherine, and hope for
Vincent, and if there was hope for them then, by God, there was hope for
you. It was important to be a thing rather than to look like a
thing. Virtues like compassion, and intelligence, and patience, they had
weight, and meaning. Roy Dotrice told us in the show once, 'the madness
is up there,' and he was right. We just needed somebody to say it to us,
was all. Here was our oasis. Come in. Sit a while. Someone might read
you a story. Someone was about to. Was it fantasy? Well, of course it
was. Every character in it is an archetype, from the Princess to the
Fool. But there was just enough reality in it to make us sigh a little,
and hope. You, too, could be something that has never been,
and never will be. That's all right. You had permission, now. Your
virtues were in your soul, not in your face so much. Relax. Someone
would love you for you, look past any flaws you might have, and treasure
you for your virtues. Catherine did. Vincent did. The World Below did,
on a daily basis. It wasn't just 'nice' to be valued for what you were,
it was the greatest, and possibly only value you had. What's that you
say? Be valued for what you were, and how you were, with others? That
was right? It was a necessity, even, in the world Ron Koslow
created. Whew! Nobody had told us that for a while, or at least nobody
had told us that, that way. Rachel Carson might be right, but there was still
time to fix what needed fixing. And Alvin Tofler might be wrong. We were
all precious, not burdens. We might all be consumers, but we were
givers, too. Helpers. Hopers. Wishers. Magic bean buyers. Relax a minute
and just look. Mary was precious, and listened to, and valued, and
needed. Children were. Mouse was. Vincent was. Rolley was. No more
fashion law for you, Cathy. Or for us. The classics were not just dead stuff made by
dead guys. They lived, and breathed, and made people care, as surely as
Vincent did. As archetypes went, this one was gentle. As souls went,
this one was deep. Relax. Breathe. Your true love might be no farther
away than a stroll across the park. And though it might be hard to find
that, and hard to get to it, well, chin up. Love would find a way to
you. Love could do that. Love was persistent, that way; and while it
might be delicate, it was very, very strong. Your Vincent was waiting for you. Or, if you were
lucky, he was there, with you in the living room, now. Love was Everything. And Everything was
Everything. No matter where you are, in your own fairy tale,
I wish you love. Happy Anniversary, Beauty and the Beast.
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