Welcome to the second edition of MMSM (for details, click here). As I mentioned in my teaser post, I thought a Fads of the ’80s theme would be fun (that’s 1980s, not 1780s). If you were too young — or old — to appreciate ’80s Fads, feel free to write on anything at all. I am completely open on themes for future MMSM’s, so please submit your fascinating ideas, as well as your story for today!
Here’s mine: When I was in the fifth grade, my family moved from marine base town purgatory Twentynine Palms, CA to Corvallis, OR. I had skipped third grade after convincing a Navy psychologist that I was relatively intelligent, comparatively speaking. Probably it was just that my third-grade teacher, a shortish chubby woman with a screaming face like a tomato, didn’t want to deal with me any more (high-strung, remember?).
The children of hippie Oregonites were more academically-inclined than those in the Mojave Desert, and as I was young for my age already, I repeated fifth grade. I was used to being the new kid, but I still didn’t like it. There was a cute boy (there always is) in my class named Eli Whitney. Eli Whitney — not the cotton gin inventor — had this trick of folding over the bottom of his acid-washed jeans and rolling them up. He was so cool!
(Isn’t this how-to picture awesome? Isn’t the internet awesome? Although, I remember doing the fold in the front and Dick remembers doing it on the side. No wonder our kids are so messed up.)
In my head I called this the “Eli Whitney popularity trick,” and I never again left home without pegging my pants (until later, of course). Imagine my surprise, when, a mere
three years later, I obsessively watched Beverly Hills, 90210 and saw that Jason Priestley knew the trick too! Now, ’80s purists may protest: I looked up 90210 on imdb.com and found that the first episode aired in October of 1990, but I think that’s close enough.
I consulted a fellow former 90210 fan, and she says she has a picture of Brandon Walsh with his pants thusly. I couldn’t find definitive evidence on google image search, but just trust me. Here are a few of the pictures I did find:
What is this? Grace Kelly? I was going to say that the people I went to high school with were just not quite this attractive, but then I found this picture on the right, and, while we might not have been as popular and cute, we certainly had the same fashionable clothes.
Just one more picture. It’s a puzzler:
…man of action?
I hope you?ve thought of a story/fad (try wikipedia.org if you’re stumped). Now that we’ve mastered Mr. Linky, two (possibly) new aspects. In the first line, enter your name and then 2-3 descriptive words in parentheses, e.g. “Jane (pegged pants, 90210).” In the second line, enter the URL of your post rather than your blog. This will help us find it, especially in the archives. If you have any questions, please leave me a comment.
If you’re blogless, please leave your story in a comment. If you do have a blog, don?t forget to link back to this page (instructions here), to spread the word about Makes-Me-Smile Monday. Please use my MMSM logo, if you like, but find your own Jason Priestley pictures!
(I reserve the right to delete any links to pages with inappropriate content.)
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I used to love 90210, but now there are reruns on the soap channel and I can’t see what the charm was at all. They’re so…so soapy.
hmmm, hence the being shown on the soap channel?
i think i might have to get the first season from blockbuster. i seem to remember that this was one of those shows (like most) that started out pretty cool, and then deteriorated and became more soapy. like l.a. law and thirtysomething, and etc. was scarecrow and mrs king in the 80s? and what about moonlighting?
ooooh, ooooh – we loved watching Remington Steel (Pierce Brosnan is so dreamy) and Beauty and the Beast – that show about Vincent, the half lion dude that had linda hamilton in it.
I know I am late in posting my 80′s fad, but before I get into that, I just want to say that I still love watching Remington Steele. My family owns all of the seasons on DVD. Before DVD’s came out, my mom had taped all of the episodes when they were reruns and my family still has about 20 tapes of Remington Steele episodes somewhere at home (unless my mom finally threw them out). What a great show.
There are so many 80′s fads that I could write about, but I am choosing jelly shoes. What a fantastic idea! Bright colored plastic shoes that hurt your feet, but look like open-toed dress pumps, that you can wear in the water, except they were slippery in the water with that heel. I had a pair of blue jelly shoes and my sister had a pair of hot pink jelly shoes. I had blue (with silver glitter in them) because I thought they would go with more of my clothes. I didn’t know then that jelly shoes don’t go with any type of clothes. My sister had hot-pink maybe because it went with her swim suit. In any case, our jelly shoes were our pride and joy, at least for the first few days after my grandmother bought them for us, and then we got tired of them because we realized they weren’t that fun to wear because the plastic cut into your feet, and they got rocks in the heel all of the time, which were difficult to dig out. Still, everytime I walked into a store selling jelly shoes, I couldn’t help but look longingly at the many different colors and think they looked cool, even if I had come to the realization that they weren’t great shoes to own and wear.
i just remembered about dynasty and dallas. i loved dallas! that was 80s, right? oh, that JR…i can’t believe when i see larry hagman pictures now. and i love the jelly shoes comment/theme above. i loved those! remember there were all those cool jelly bracelets? they came in all colors and you were sooo cool if you had a ton of them? during part of my madonna phase i would only deign to wear black ones out of reverence.
great theme…i am sorry i didn’t get to it sooner. oh, the lovely 80′s.
oh, and shannon, i will prob talk to you about this tonight…but i keep putting my name and blog addy in and it comes up black instead of yellow like all the other names…do you think i am doing something wrong? thanks!
Barb, it looks yellow to me, maybe it’s got something to do with your cookies on your computer. Or something. I’m no techie. But when I post mine it looks blue and the others look yellow.
blue is links that you haven’t clicked on yet, yellow/orange is after you’ve clicked. (i think — i am even more not a techie!!)
Barb–yours looks fine to me too. i’m glad you wrote about Madonna; i remember loving her as early as 2nd grade or something! (but my mom didn’t know i liked her
)