Vag Hates the 80s

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A few years ago, I was hungover in Cuba and the only English channel in our room was VH1. As I lay in bed, bucket in hand, I watched the I Love the 80s marathon with my equally, if not more so, hungover husband. We laughed and shuddered through hour after hour of the best and the worst. We reminisced over our first Rubic's Cubes and our penchant for hair bands. My husband confessed his secret love of Bon Jovi, though he was loathe to admit it. I told him about my Note Tote binders covered in "I love Tom Cruise" and "Corey Haim + Vag=TLF." We were awesome. Our hangovers went away and we returned to the bar that had caused our condition and enjoyed the rest of our vacation.

And then it happened.

We returned home and carried on as before, but something was different. I started noticing wide necked, off the shoulder shirts in some of my favourite stores. Jelly bracelets were covering the arms of sales people. Giant belts popped up on mannequins in all the department stores. Hungry Like the Wolf was on heavy rotation on all the radio stations and Patrick Dempsey was on the cover of People magazine. What was happening here? Should I invest in Aquanet now?

As I wandered the city dumfounded by the return of possibly the worst decade ever, I remembered my mother laughing at my wide legged jeans as she told me about her first pair of bell bottoms. I rolled my eyes and told her that my awesome pants were totally different than anything she ever wore in nineteen-dickety-six. Now, I cringed with the realization that everything does come back in style. It was not so long ago that I was making fun of the kid in the velour sweatsuit or laughing so hard at Alf that I almost cried. Was it? Twenty years feels like forever when you're a kid. I would have never believed that when I was back combing my bangs into "the claw" and squishing my oversized neon socks down that I would someday live to regret these fashion choices.

I have heard plenty of teenage girls talking about how awesome the 80s were and how they totally, you know, like love those giant hoop earings and oh-mah-gawd this jean skirt is, like, the totally cutest thing like evah. As I fight the urge to smack them, I am calmed by the memory of my best friend and me smoking ridiculously long cigarettes in even more ridiculously long cigarette holders, lamenting that we were born in the wrong era. We longed to be anywhere but there and we were certain that we would have been fabulous if only we were born in the right time. The kids of today (I know, I can't believe I said it either) will never know the true horror that was the 1980s. They'll never be terrified of Freddy coming to kill you in your sleep. They'll never own an album by Stryker. They will never know the shame of not knowing how to fold their jeans into the perfect taper. They will take what was fun and quirky out of the worst decade ever and leave us with the memory of the true eighties burned in our brains. The 80s sucked it. Hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably didn't have to live through them.