Sign O' The Times (261)

 Purple Rain

Adolescence is portrayed as very different from generation to generation, yet at the core, it is very much the same. Angst, assertion, and amplified emotions. Every generation had their music, their movies, their culture. For mine, the 1980’s it was built around Prince’s music. He sang our feelings, our heartbreak, our aspirations. “Purple Rain” was our battle cry. For some it was other songs, but for our group, our tight knit cohort- it was the song we fell quiet too. It was the color we wore, at least a splash of, it was the echo of our commitment to each other. We attended a small high school, open campus, freedom to go to the beach during lunch, or just hang in the band quad. We had the independence many schools lack today- but this squelched our rebelliousness, it made us feel free and thus we didn’t search for ways to cause an insurgency.

Laguna Beach was a small town in the 1980's. At least it felt small. Two supermarkets, one high school. Nestled into a cove between Dana Point and Newport Beach, California. Summer was crowded with tourists; our Art's Festival was famous. Sawdust on the floor, I used to walk through it with bare feet, feeling the wood between my toes. After I graduated, I worked there, selling jewelry I didn't make myself. I would spend hours wandering and looking at beautiful art, I could never afford. But the festival didn't feel pretentious, it felt accessible to us. It was the social center of our community from June to August and I wanted to feel a part of it. Yet I was always on the outside looking in. What felt like a rural community was suburban, but from a coming of age teenager perspective, it was heaven. Big enough where we felt we had a connection to the world and small enough where most of the world left us alone for most of the year, at least.

Little Red Corvette or rather an AMC Hornet

Population wise we saw circles and cliques at our high school, but it didn't really matter. The cliques just seemed to ebb and flow, merge and separate like wax in a lava lamp. I had friends, we were a misfit group of oddballs- we were odd even for the 80's. Prince, Oingo Boingo, The Cure, The Smiths, Depeche Mode and Duran Duran were our bands of choice but Violent Femmes, Jane's Addiction and U2 were among the many blaring from our car speakers, as we drove through the streets of our small coastal town. We were the outcasts before the Breakfast Club made it cool to be one. Our vehicles were beaten down jalopies: An AMC Hornet, Oldsmobile and 1982 Honda Accord (duct-taped bumper). Laguna Beach in the 1980's as far as a teens point of view, was not about prestige or popularity, even wealth- it was about making the best of what you had.

Unless you drove Laguna Canyon or El Toro Road- Laguna Beach was unreachable back then, now there is a toll road leading straight to it. The isolation back then, made us creative as teenagers: no cell phones, computers or Internet. We had mix tapes, board games and driving around. This we mastered. We also had MTV- real videos that spoke to us, inspired us. We saw opportunities to have fun and we did. We got bored and found ways not to be bored, like scavenger hunts and lip syncs. These were free. We didn't have a lot of money, but we did have each other, and this is very different from today, mainly because we didn't have everything at our fingertips- we had to go out and find our adventures. Our noses were not facing down to our phones, or up on Instagram trying to outdo one another. We drove to the Circle K and hung out in the parking lot on Friday nights. We had bonfires on Saturday nights at Aliso Beach. We were always together, physically, socially and mentally, we talked a lot, face to face, worked out our problems in person not via trolling or texting. It was very much a different time.

Let’s Go Crazy- or Not

Curfew was in place, but we generally stayed at each others houses so frequently- it was understood, that our responsibility was to check-in, not be home every night. We left a message on the answering machine. The infamous answering machines. We used pay phones to do so, or we left messages with parents and they shared it with one another. Strange to think about that world, free of instant communication. We made it through weeks without seeing our parents faces- messages on the fridge sufficed, when we stopped by to take a shower and grab a change of clothes. 

This may sound like a fictional place, a fairy tale- but it was just life in the 1980's, in a small beach town in California. The place is gone, replaced with modernity but the past is never replaced, it is forever edging the angles and carving the valleys of adulthood. When I see my children engrossed with You Tube and their eyes on a piece of technology, it makes me feel sad. We were lucky, we saw a wide-open space and decided to go check it out. We "hiked to Canada" as we used to call it- getting lost for the day outside in the middle of nowhere, that's a story for later.

These days getting lost is immersing in the Internet, inwards rather than outwards. This novel is going to be a bridge between modern ideals and the 1980's vision of a teenage girl, who may have grown up with simpler perspectives and still holds them dear, but who has adapted to the 'Sign 'O' the Times, as Prince so eloquently put it. Music may have changed, technology advanced, but at the heart of all of us who grew up in a decade of opulence, personal connection and individualism- we remember. We do not necessarily want to go back, but we want to keep those quintessential aspects of our teenage aspirations and dreams alive, for they are the core of who we are. We may use our phones every day for more than their original purpose- to simply talk to one another. They are now tools of global connection, albeit a virtual one. But deep down, we can still envision a pay phone, change in hand at the side of the road, We can still hear that tape rewinding, as we checked our messages.

Raspberry Beret, or Various Hats Maybe

This tale, told through anecdotes and tales of my teenage years and those of my children, is going to be how things may seem drastically different, how the 1980's almost seem foreign to millennial's, but in reality- we are very much the same, simply with different instruments at our fingertips. I hope you join me on this adventure. Every week a new chapter in the story of my collision of past and present, music infused with memory and comparison. 1980’s, 1990’s and the new century. I hope you enjoy the ride. Oh, and did I mention I love hats. I used to wear a huge black one at the beach, blocking my very pale skin from the sun. Many would say I was goth in high school but trust me I was everything but. That, however, is another story.