The 80s And Utter Lack Of Political Correctness

I wasn’t exactly Paris Hilton, thank God! No diamond tiaras adorned my head or hung from the edge of the my dream canopy bed. I didn’t have a horse or one of those fabulous battery powered Barbie cars that kids can ride in, although I did long for all of those things. 

What I did have was an imagination and an amazing mother who let me express it. 

“Mom, can I cut up the Halloween costume you spent hours making so that I can reenact Michael Jackson’s Thriller video?”

My mother's knowing smile. “Sure honey.” 

“Can I rearrange the entire house and put the living room furniture in the dining room?”

My mother’s puzzled look. “Umm, why?”

“I want to pretend to do Barbara-Walters-like videos with my Cabbage Patch dolls and the windows in there have the best light.”

The knowing look again. “Sure, but you have to put everything back.”

There were limitations of course. She was livid the one time that I pushed all the furniture against the computer room door locking her in there with no means of escape. 

My childhood, was always dramatic to say the least. Wether I was pretending to be Olivia Newton-John and making the neighborhood sit through the entire lip-synched concert of Olivia’s Greatest Hits Volume One or choreographing an epic dance number for all the kids to perform during our annual super-bowl party my dreams of putting on an awesome show never ceased.

Naturally, our house was the house to hang at. No one else’s parents would allow complete monopolization of the family home or a double birthday party with my little sister where we all dressed up like characters from the movie Clue and played a murder mystery game, complete with butler and candy cigarettes. Oh, the eighties were fun with their utter lack of political correctness.

There was always (except for the locking her in the computer room incident) fairly good parental supervision. A lot of the time these things would take place while my mom was visiting with her best girlfriends. We were just trusted. We weren’t going to give away the family dog or burn down the house, and we cleaned up the mess ourselves. It didn’t hurt that we lived on a really good sized piece of property with large trees for pretending we were on Endor and lots of room for creative playing.

The eighties weren’t the days of Leave It To Beaver where you rose at dawn, left the house and your parents didn’t worry unless you weren’t home by six sharp for dinner. Nor were they like how it is today, where kids have to stay in there own yards and carry their cellphone at all times so a pedophile doesn’t grab them. No, there were plenty of pedophiles around in my day, I just thought they were these super friendly people who really thought kids were cool that your parents told you to stay away from. 

It’s a scary thought to me now, but back then I didn’t have a care. I knew that I needed to always be within shouting distance of the house, which meant I lived in a rather noisy neighborhood, but I was lucky enough to live on a country block with lots of kids and therefore lots of parents looking out for me.

I rode bikes up and down these really steep hills all day with all the neighborhood kids and we took turns roaming each other's yards and houses. One time I convinced everyone to weed our garden by paying them all a penny for their hard work and in the end no one hated me. It was amazing, and our garden looked like a giant pile of dirt. I guess we did too good of a job.

I never did grow up to become Barbara Walters, but the blessing is that when I was little I thought that I could be, the future was limitless and I was fortunate enough to believe that nothing was impossible as long as I used my imagination and moved some furniture around.