The eighties were a fine decade. I was there. I admit they existed. I had a Caboodle and holey jean shorts. Sadly, I wasn’t old enough to partake in all the free-flowing cocaine and dollar bills I hear mentioned when someone daydreams of the eighties. I also missed out on the music so often played now at frat parties and dive bars. My dad listened to opera. My mom listened to Motown. I didn’t have any older siblings to introduce me to cool stuff like that band with the one-armed drummer. Until college, I really thought there was a very famous deaf leopard at some zoo.
For me, the eighties were a decade of dates at McDonald’s Playland, torturing babysitters and learning why my fingers smelled funny when I stuck them in my butt. When I think of my past, I much prefer to reminisce about the nineties, when I wore padded bras, spent dates at Olive Garden and moved to California.
Some people, however, lived their best years in that colorful decade. They had sex in a bathroom at the Rainbow Room with Ron Jeremy. They bought stock in IBM. They amassed the biggest collection of cassettes and betas on the block. They fucked every White Snake member on a black lacquered table. They partied with Wham at fancy beach parties and tattooed roses on their tits. They wore shoulder pads and sold real estate and then went home to their black and red apartments to drink fancy wine with a side of cocaine.
They lived through that decade. And some refuse to believe it’s over. These eighties dwellers aren’t trendsetters who are ‘getting back to their roots’ by adopting an updated set of leggings from Forever XXI. In the twenty years since that decade, Eighties Leighdies haven’t changed and they don’t want to. Some still have small traces of pink zinc oxide in the creases of their noses. They’re a rapidly endangered species, but they make appearances at Au Bon Pains and Kinkos locations near you. When I see one, I nod my head and smile in understanding. Because I get it. I know they can’t let go of a time so great. I understand why they want to continue to look like an extra in Working Girl. Because Working Girls had it made. They had power in their bangs and knew how to work a shoulder pad.
The next time you see an Eighties Leighdy, whether she’s in a full set of Lee press-ons and a pantsuit that tapers over a pair of Reeboks or sandblasted denim cutoffs, a Duran Duran concert T-shirt, and a pink fannie pack, don’t judge her as living in the past. See her as reveling in the best years of her life.
And maybe, just maybe… throw her up a real nice, powerful, hang ten. Show her you know she’s totally radical.
Note: It was not my intention to draw the Eighties Leighdy to look like Jay Leno.