I'll Tumble 4 Ya! BlogFest

Aloha,

Ah, the ubiquitous ‘80s.

Oh, it’s so totally cool, rad even to be doing this hop :)

I honestly can’t remember who I had crushes on – per the theme - but I'll try as I'm writing... and I do remember some other like things like:

·         Punkalicious was totally a cool word. Totally.

·         Recreation consisted of meeting the mates at the snooker hall and video games were playing some hi-tech stuff like Galaga and Asteroid at the video arcade.

Howard Jones - The Man, The Hair!

·         I used to have hair, lots of it… there is even a picture of me wearing a mullet (only I didn’t know what a mullet was :) Howard Jones was one of favorite musicians and I loved trying to copy his sweet-looking hair-do!

·         Boy George and Culture Club made sense to me. (Scary note: George will be SIXTY in June… time for a name change to Senior George?)

·         No surprise that I was an angry teen, but I found comfort in the music of Depeche Mode (they remain my fav. group, like.) And, it still blows me away to see DM’s lead singer, Dave Gahan, make 70,000 fans at the Rose Bowl wave their hands in the air (like they just don’t care.) If you’re interested, it happens at 3:50 – 5:00 in the vid.

· I heard of a “Valley Girl” but I thought they were hot babes who lived at the bottom of some mountain range (serious.)

· Where’s the Beef was a cool commercial, but we didn’t have “a Wendy” in Dublin, and only two McDonalds in the whole country (it seemed like!)

Wham! (What did that even mean?)

     Frankie said Relax and we all bought T-shirts to remind our friends how cool we were...only to have all the coolness dashed on the rocks when the mates walked around the corner wearing their latest WHAM! T-shirt… (Gosh, I’m nearly peeing myself… oh, we were so young:)

·         Cyndi Lauper told me that Girls just wanted to have fun… but when I went to the clubs, I was too shy to ask many of them… and when I did, all we’d do was wear out a little patch on the beer (and puke-stained) “dance floor” by going around and around in mini, I mean tiny circles.

·         Pretty in Pink was the Best Movie evah… I knew I’d remember, OK, so I had the biggest (sigh) crush on Molly Ringwald (who is now 43 and an author amongst other things :)

·         Yuppies were so cool and they acted like they were the dog’s bollix. We all wanted to be one… and yes I DID own a shiny, polyester grey and black suit worn with the obligatory skinny black tie.

·         Duh! I do remember another crush! Anne Fennell, she of the FIRST KISS. We were both fifteen, and had arranged to meet “under Cleary’s clock” (any Dubliner reading this will be smiling) and I knew she was coming from her place in the “country.” (Anything five miles outside the city center was “the country” as in the farms and villages.) Anyway, so we were supposed to meet at 1 p.m. and she didn’t show up… so I waited…. and waited…. and waited… for TWO and a HALF hours…. and guess what… she showed up... aahhh :)

·         I remember seeing my first computer (a Commodore 64) and wondered if they’d ever catch on… it seemed like you couldn’t do much with them and the green flashing dot was annoying, like.

·         And, finally, I started the ‘80s as an 11-year-old boy in an all-male Christian Brothers “school,” and finished the coolest decade as a 21-year-old in Amsterdam, Holland. Like I said, it was a fabulous decade and I’m so glad to have been forever young in the decade that will never die. Long live the ‘80s :)

How about you?

How did the Eighties handle your heart?