You will need to look elsewhere today.
I was driving earlier this morning and listening to, of
course, 80’s on 8 and what was playing? None other than Madonna…Open Your Heart from 1987. My mind
immediately jumped to math and one of the primary uses that I have for it in my life…calculating
time…in this case, how old I was and what I was doing in 1987*.
I was 13 or 14 and in the 8th grade or 9th
grade (depending on the month). I found myself trying to remember what I might
have been doing at exactly 8:45 on a Wednesday morning in October way back in 1987.
Junior High School…9th grade…end of 1st
period Civics with Mr. Qualls…about to go to 2nd period Geometry with
Ms. Collier.
Why can I remember that but can’t remember to pick up my dry-cleaning
or put the chicken in the crock pot?
Anyway, I pictured myself which means, I pictured my school
portrait from that year which featured an asymmetrical permed hair-did and an
obnoxiously-colorful, oversized Esprit sweater.
Your basic 1980s horror show.
Then 1987 in general
is where my mind floated. I couldn’t come up with anything really specific about
that year except October 19 (which I’ll get to in a minute) and so I googled it and found these events which occurred in 1987:
January
8 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes for the
first time above 2,000, gaining 8.30 to close at 2,002.25. (It closed in
the 16,000s yesterday.)
February 20 – A second Unabomber bomb explodes at a Salt Lake City computer store, injuring the owner. (Ted Kaczynski, aka “the Unabomber” wasn’t captured until 1996.)
March
9 – The Irish rock band U2 releases their studio album The
Joshua Tree. (Always and forever one of my top 5 favorite albums. Since
then, lead singer, Bono, has gone on to do some humanitarian work.)
April
19 – The Simpsons cartoon first appears as a series
of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show. (The Simpsons have
been on the air for 26 years meaning that Maggie could vote, drink, and run for
Congress despite still being an infant.)
May 17 – USS Stark is hit by two Iraqi-owned Exocet AM39 air-to-surface missiles killing
47 sailors. (They’ve pretty much always been a thorn in our side—even when
they were on our side…or we were on
their side during the Iran-Iraq war…which was still going on in 1987…at which
point, somehow, both nations had weapons that were made in the USA. Because foreign
policy is hard.)
June
12 – During a visit to Berlin, Germany, President Ronald Reagan
challenged Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. (And
eventually they did…beginning November 9, 1989...after which we became BFFs with
Russia, peace broke out in the former Eastern Bloc, everyone lived happily ever
after, and Vladimir Putin hunted dangerous wildlife without a shirt on.)
July
11 -- World population is estimated to have reached five billion
people, according to the United Nations. (We are about 7.3 billion now. Projected
to be 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 billion by 2050. Which means that population
experts are very positive about our global abilities when it comes to making
babies and not dying.)
August
4 -- The Federal Communications Commission rescinds the Fairness
Doctrine, which had required radio and television stations to
"fairly" present controversial issues. (Ummmmmm, yeah….EPIC. FAIL.)
September
28 – The second Star Trek TV series The Next
Generation premieres in syndication. (I’m including this because
I love all things Star Trek and Patrick Stewart and it’s my blog so I can
include non-sequiturs at will.)
October 19 – BLACK MONDAY. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell exactly 508 points to
1,738.74 (22.61%).
November
18 -- Iran–Contra affair: U.S. Senate and House panels release reports
charging President Ronald Reagan with ‘ultimate responsibility’ for the affair.
(Because in 1987, much like in 2015, it’s always better – and by better, I mean
easier – to find one person to blame than to recognize
institutional quagmires and years-long foreign-policy "shifts" that allow clusterf***s to
flourish. Thanks, Obama.)
December
8 – The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is signed in
Washington, D.C. by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev. (Because all Presidents do good things and all Presidents do
not-so-good things and it’s important to look at people and presidencies in
their entirety – not just the parts that affirm your worldview. Unless you’re
a fanatic. Then you get to look at whatever you want and be a party leader. Or a radio personality.)
So about Black Monday…
At the time, this 14-year-old thought is was the end of the world as we knew it. Seriously, people killed
themselves. We thought we were headed into a Mad Max type apocalyptic world
economic shutdown. In my Civics Class we were playing the Stock Market game
which was sponsored by the Commercial
Appeal in Memphis – a city I would surely never live in. NOBODY won the
Stock Market game that year except for Paul Tudor Jones II – a native Memphian,
incidentally. As it turns out it was not the
end of the world because I was still here for the next Mad Max type apocalyptic
world economic shutdown which occurred in 2008. And by “here”, I mean I was alive
and living in Memphis…for a decade.
No one knows what the future holds, my friends.
But back to my car ride this morning because I’m
worried that things are starting to get deep and meaningful and I really want to focus on Madonna. In
1987, Madonna was 29 years old. She could frolic about on stage and writhe
awkwardly on the floor wearing a cone-shaped bustier and the only people who
recoiled were people who had a moral issue with her music or her overtly sexual
persona…her performance identity. Now when she does that (because she did do that at the Grammy’s back in
February), people are divided into two camps. There are some who just don’t
think a 57-year-old has any business carrying herself that way – and I get
that.
Then there are others who would never want to see their own daughter
writhing on the floor dressed in a cone-shaped bustier, but hope and pray that they themselves have
that kind of energy and confidence when they are 57. Not that they would want
to or would be given the opportunity to writhe on the floor at the Grammy’s, but
they would love to be able to dance
and sing (albeit in a different outfit) around their family room at 57 without requiring
anyone to call Emergency Services when they’re done.
But did you catch that? Madonna is 57
years old. That means that 1987 was half her life ago and she’s still dancing.
There was a time when I might have thought that 57 was really old. This is not that time. Age becomes more relative with each passing day. I was going to provide you with a list of people
who are also 57 -- for some shock and awe. Some names would shock and amaze you -- two kids from the Brady Bunch, Charlie Bucket from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,
Gretl from the Sound of Music. Others
might be easier to absorb – Matt Lauer, Steve Buscemi, Christiane Amanpour –
not because they seem older, but
because we never “knew” them as kids.
You can Google more names. Shaun Cassidy is there too.
There was also a list of people who died at the age
of 57…Patrick Swayze, Madeline Kahn, Jan Hooks and Humphrey Bogart. That puts things in perspective
too. None of us know if we will even get
57 years.
Time and its passage are always fascinating to me.
How the days seem to drag at times and then suddenly you’re looking back at
years which passed by in a flash. I wonder, in 28 years, what people will remember
about 2015. I wonder what 57 will look like for me. I wonder if there will ever be a Teens on 10
radio station on Sirius XM and, if there is, if anyone will take the time to
write this kind of drivel inspired by the music they hear driving down the
road.
And I wonder why you are still reading.
I guess they can’t all be masterpieces.
*According to Wikipedia, this song was actually released
late in 1986.
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