The 80s Club

I show several 80s movies in my classes every semester. If you think you can’t work Fast Times at Ridgemont High into a Literature class, then you are much mistaken, my friend!
I always have fun, sharing this part of myself with my students, but I’m always saddened too. My students, these young pups and children of the 90s, are wildly amused by the movies and enjoy watching them, but they see them as delightfully weird oddities. They see the fun and quirkiness in them, but they don’t often catch the magic.
Those movies are so much a part of my growing …read more

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What was hip in the 80s is hot once more. A look at the fashion that’s happening and practical this year:
Flats – They’re comfy, cute and go with any outfit. “Whether you’re spending $15 at Target or $150 at Anthropologie, the trend is colors, cutouts and sweet, flirty rounded toes.”
Toeless tights – Whether you choose black or turquoise and stripes, short or long, update your wardrobe with these inexpensive pieces. “Short ones are best worn so they end at the widest point of the calf; long ones should extend to halfway between there and the ankle bone.”
Long shirts – Belly-baring …read more

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The Material Girl is quoted in the Mirror as saying that, by today’s standards, she was too fat when she was just starting out. She thinks she wouldn’t have been able to compete with today’s skinnier pop stars.
“I would have been too fat,” she claims.
“When I started out I was kind of zaftig (Yiddish term for plump). I would have had to get anorexia.
“They would have said: ‘She is way too chubby’.”
Madonna fat?!? Not then, and certainly not now.

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I got a spiffy new PlayStation 2 for my birthday last week, and the first game I ran out to purchase was Singstar 80s. Singstar, for those who don’t know, is the greastest game ever. Essentially, it’s a karaoke-style competition game where you and a few of your drunken friends get together and sing along with your favorite artists. You can read me going on and on about the game here and here and I think here, too.
Now, depending on your geographical location, the song choices are different. If you’re in the United States, for example, you …read more

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I never had a Cabbage Patch doll.
You simply cannot realize the terror, the horror, the absolute grief of that statement unless you were a little girl in the 80s.
(Or of course, a little boy of the type so inclined to play with dolls, like my cousin Jesse. Jesse ended up, surprisingly, not as a female impersonator in Vegas, but as a rather successful porn star with the stage name Zeus Goldenrod, which pretty much makes him the most successful member of our family ever. But I digress.)
You have no idea how insane people were for these dolls. The …read more

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The 1989 pop star and singer of the #1 hit “Toy Soldier” has risen from musical obscurity with her new goth band OPPERA, and she’s convinced that they’re going to make it big.
OPPERA, a goth-pop group she fronts with her husband, musician Michael Mozart, plays the intimate Perking Latte Cafe, 840 Castleton Ave., in West Brighton, Wednesday at 8. Admission is free.
“At some point that won’t really be possible,” she said. “Imagine Aerosmith at Perking Latte. We definitely are aspiring to have that type of career. To be like the really big successful bands that have the longevity …read more

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In the 80s has a year-by-year timeline of our favorite decade, highlighting what occurred during each year. The site’s author, Charles R. Grosvenor Jr., gives the following names for each year according to what, to him, were the most memorable events:
1980 (The year of Dallas)
1981 (The year of the Pac-Man)
1982 (The year of the Thriller)
1983 (The year of the Cabbage Patch doll)
1984 (The year of the Cosby Show)
1985 (The year of the benefit concerts)
1986 (The year of disasters)
1987 (The year of the baby)
1988 (The year of the CD)
1989 (The year of the Fall of the Wall)
[Source: In the 80s]

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