Thursday, February 5, 2015

The 80s Child Works Hard for a Living (or at least watches a lot of TV)

gisellerenarde: i need to blog about the 80s.
  i don't know what to say

Sweet: google the 80's see what you get ..
  maybe something will pop

gisellerenarde: what's a tv show from the 80s?

Sweet: Cosby, ATeam, Cheers, ALF, Knight Rider, Dallas, Whos the Boss

gisellerenarde: i'm getting nostalgic

Sweet: Dukes of Hassard, Full House

gisellerenarde: OMG i hated Full House. Leslie LOVED it.

Sweet: Miami Vice

gisellerenarde: oh yeah

Sweet: THE SIMPSONS

gisellerenarde: LOL premiered in 89. I remember it well...
  I wasn't allowed to watch it when it first came out, but i did anyway

Sweet: Happy Days, Growing Pains, Family Ties, Dystany, Hill Street Blues, Threes Company , STNG

gisellerenarde: i grew up on threes company. it's one of my earliest memories (although it started in the late 70s i think)

Sweet: 77 to 84

gisellerenarde: yea i looked it up once
  i watched it again maybe 5 years ago and i couldn't believe how terrible it was

Sweet: Taxi, Love Boat

gisellerenarde: actually i dream of jeannie is one of my first memories too
  watching i dream of jeannie at my grandparents' house when they used to take care of me during the day, which was before Leslie was born, which means i was under 2

Sweet: Golden Girls, Airwolf, Wonder Years, Mork and MIndy Knots Landing Fall Guy, Fantasy Island, Night Court, MacGuyver, Murder She Wrote

gisellerenarde: oh murder she wrote
  i told you my mom used to pay us a nickel to brush her hair during murder she wrote

Sweet: hahaha

gisellerenarde: it aired on sundays and sunday was bath night and my mom would get her bath then make that air-popped popcorn with half a cup of melted butter over it. you and she are the only two people in the world who like that grossness

Sweet: Bosom Buddies

gisellerenarde: i don't know what that is

Sweet: Moonlighting

gisellerenarde: you know what i remembered today?

Sweet: what

gisellerenarde: i've told you before that we sometimes spent overnights or a weekend at my grandma's because of my dad

Sweet: yes

gisellerenarde: but today i remembered there was about a month where my mom and my siblings and i lived in my aunt and uncle's basement
  an entire month

Sweet: wow

gisellerenarde: it was a finished basement, but it was just one big room. they lived in a small bungalow. the basement had a pull-out couch. that's where we all slept
  i honestly can't remember how old i was. jane wasn't born yet, so it would have been sometime in the 80s

Sweet: hmmmm

gisellerenarde: i wonder how my mom explained that to people. we just weren't living at our house? but my dad was? for a month?

Sweet: dont know .. ask her

gisellerenarde: my mom doesn't like to talk about the past
  it makes her really uncomfortable

Sweet: wonder where you get it from hahahaha

gisellerenarde: heh no kidding

For Spencer, From the 80s

10 comments:

  1. Giselle:
    Its amazing how music and television is woven into the fabric of our lives. I had forgotten about Hill Street Blues, one of my favs. I met Ed Marinaro (sp?) at a celebrity tennis tournament-a complete jerk. It took me a bit to realize you didn't have cable or MTV would have been in the mix. Ah Miami Vice. The three day beard and all that moody music. Were you young enough that you had "My Little Pony"? How about jellies?

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  2. One fine example of the evolution of a conversation. Thanks for that Gisselle!

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  3. Ah, memories! When husband and I were dating then moved in together in the early 80s, we'd tape Dynasty and Dallas and watch them during dinner. I told him one time that they were "soap operas for men." I explained that to men, the most important thing seemed to be power, and whichever man held the power got the money, and would get to bed the most attractive females, run roughshod over his fellow men, etc. (There's an old saying that any time there are two or more men in one place, there will be a contests devised by them to prove who is "better"...and there will be one or more women there waiting to "reward" the winner.)

    I told him that if he really wanted to watch soap operas, he should go "hard-core" with me. He was intrigued. So we started taping General Hospital and watching that every night. He got so good at predicting months in advance where the plots were going, that I teased him he should be writing the show.

    Daily soap operas, for all of their mind-numbingly slow pace, were targeted to females who were bored with their at-home lives. As a college student, I never liked All My Brats, (my name for it), but I loved General Hospital. It went off the deep end with sci-fi twists even. My favorite. Women want to be loved. On daytime soaps, even the men talk about their feelings continuously, the way women do. Fantasy. Plus it was the first show for many stars like: Demi Moore, John Stamos, and Rick Springfield. John Stamos had one of the hottest love scenes I've ever seen on TV, when he was playing a randy teenager. Growl!

    I guess it goes back to the old saying:
    Men need to make love to feel loved. Women need to feel loved to make love.
    Twas ever thus.
    However sex with strangers, a la Dynasty and Dallas, might be fun for a while, but like eating junk food, its superficiality makes it get old quickly. It's fun while it lasts, but you will eventually miss the connectedness that comes with making love.

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  4. Ooh! Hill Street Blues! Night Court! (And probably Barney Miller.) And Cheers! And certainly one or another of the incarnations of Star Trek. Must look that up. Knight Rider and Dukes of Hazzard were watched by my younger son, but I managed to block them out.

    Thanks, Giselle, I'm beginning to remember the 80s. Well, somewhat conflicted thanks.

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  5. I remember watching Night Court in syndication every day at like 5 in in the afternoon? I wasn't "allowed" to watch it, but nobody ever changed the channel, so...

    And I STILL have a My Little Pony. It's on the shelf in my bathroom. If I can get out from under this blanket of cats, I'll take a picture of it.

    P.S. this is my second attempt at posting a comment. My comments ALWAYS get eaten here.

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    1. Sweet!
      I dated a woman for a while in the mid 80's- a single mom with a 5yr old daughter. She loved My Little Pony. The idea that sweet little girl is near age 40 is unthinkable.

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  6. I haven't watched TV for many decades, so all this is a mystery to me. We owned a television but used it only for watching movies.

    Well, not "I Dream of Jeannie" - that was on when I was in high school. Was it still playing in the 80's?

    I love the device of the conversation, though. Did it really run this way, or is this imagined?


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    1. Copied directly from Yahoo Messenger, typos and all. Because laziness. I mean creativity! Creativity! Like when I was in Grade 7 and submitted a kindergarten colouring sheet as an art project--sort of an objet trouvé.

      I Dream of Jeannie was on TV during the day when I was very young. That and Gilligan's Island. These are hazy recollections.

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    2. No wonder it seemed so authentic. Maybe you can't make these things up!

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  7. Oh, those shows... Moonlighting! I swear I sort of feel like Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd (sp?) are my relatives or something. I cared about them so much.

    Also, I live in Rhode Island, where Hasbro is based. They hold a My Little Pony conference once a year. One year, I thought that might be a fun, weird thing to do and decided to see about getting a ticket. Only to discover that it had been sold out for months... My Little Pony is still so popular!

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