Remember Whoever When

[pameladean]

UPDATE: You people are completely stupendous. Don't stop; if you wanted to post something and haven't had time, feel free, if you want to, because I'm sure not done yet. I apologize for casting my net so wide that it's hard to organize your thoughts, but don't worry about it. Every single comment has been pure gold. I ought to take you all out for dinner, were it physically possible.

I have just realized that I have a gap in the background of my book. I'm not sure that anything I do or use to fill it in will make it onto the page in any discernible form, but I'm finding myself stopping a dozen times in two hundred words to wonder about stuff that I don't know, and some of it can't just be made up. Naturally, in this extreme, I turn to LJ.

I did this once before, on Usenet, when I asked people who were willing to talk about their experience of online romance to tell me about it. The book this was all supposed to go into took several years longer to write than I had hoped, the protagonist turned out to be vehemently against online experiences of any sort, and the character who actually had the experience was not a viewpoint character, so it all turned out rather sideways to expectation; but I still found the information people so generously gave me useful as a kind of very deep background. Then I forgot to put them into the acknowledgements. Just so you know.

It seems foolish to say that there is no obligation -- how could there be? -- but when I did this on Usenet, I got a number of very indignant emails from people who seemed to think that I was implying an obligation. So -- there is no obligation whatsoever to even read the rest of this entry. As always.

If, around 1987 or so (a few years earlier is useful, later than that year is not, alas), you were a teenager, had a teenager, or hung out with teenagers, I'd be interested in anything that you can remember and wish to mention about what it was like: how it felt (though a lot of that is timeless and universal), what you or your nearby teenagers read, ate, watched, listened to, did, worried about, or loved. I have no desire whatsoever to bring up unpleasant memories for anybody. I realize that this is akin to asking people not to think about a pink elephant. Stop it at once.

I don't expect to use anybody's personal anecdotes in recognizable form (nobody anywhere being much like the character who's holding out on me), and would certainly ask permission to do so should I be wrong in my expectations. If you don't mind participating but don't wish to post in public comments, it's fine to send me email -- the address is on my LJ profile page. Letting me know your geographical location at the time in question would be useful. And yes, I will be doing other research, but I want to do this too. Naturally, as I said above, nobody is obliged to grant this desire.

If you do, I'll try to remember to put you in the acknowledgements, should you wish to be there.

Also, anybody who doesn't fall within this demographic or have memories of people who do, but is reminded of something and wants to post about it, feel free to do so. It may not be useful but, it's bound to be interesting. I don't want to stifle the conversation in the least.

Thank you.

P.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Well, my son's biological mom ran away that year. She was just under fourteen. She joined the Rainbow people and wandered around, and met the young fellow there who became my son's biological dad. It was a sort of recreation hippie experience for them, organized by someone who had very starry-eyed memories, or impressions, of the late sixties. They worked in fields, did some mildly environmentally conscious things, but mostly lived hand to mouth in a continuous drug haze and love-in. Most of them had run away from controlling households (my spokesperson had run away from an extraordinarily strict Mormon house in which there was a lot of yelling and even beatings for the boys) and a great deal of talk about what young ladies should do, etc. A very peculiar echo of my own fifties childhood and later experiences.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. 1987. The year I started college at 16. Quite a memorable year, that.

And yet I'm finding myself blanking on the small details you seem to searching for here. I know, for instance, that I watched Cheers and Night Court and Moonlighting -- I had a major, major crush on Bruce Willis -- and I know I read incessantly, and I know the radio was often on. I saw Princess Bride that year, and fell in love with the film. I know I had my first date where I kept thinking, this is it? I know I started wondering about my sexuality, trying to determine what I was, if I was normal or not. I know I also took marvelous, magical trips to New York City -- I lived in Connecticut, and Manhattan and shops were only an hour away. I know I revelled in small rebellions, including heading to places in Manhattan that I was distinctly not allowed to head to. I know my best, my very best day of that year was the first snowfall of the year, when three friends and I trooped through the snow to a pizza place, bought pizza, headed back, and had a nice sloppy snowfight and hot chocolate. A totally perfect day; the hardest type to describe. I know I hated the fact that everybody else seemed to know how to dress well, and I didn't. (This is still true. It just no longer bothers me much.) Oh, and I wanted, desperately, to have better hair, and I wanted, really desperately, to look like Robin Wright in Princess Bride.

Unfortunately the angst of the rest of that year overshadows the rest. But those are the happy memories that leapt to mind.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I was seventeen in 1987. A senior in high school. Greater Boston area.

The topic is so broad as to baffle me. I had learned to drive, but didn't have my own car, and state law forbade me from driving after 1 AM, so I was still in a constant low-level state of searching for people of legal age to drive to Rocky Horror, as the T stopped running before the movie let out.

I had something of a split personality, musically... I kept my radio on WFNX, the alternative/new wave station, but I was also a neo-hippie, and went to my first Grateful Dead concert that summer.

I was reading Zelazny's Amber novels, and Darkover, and being disappointed with the later Thieves' World books, and I got a new Hitchhiker's book as a Hannukah present every year, it seemed, and would read it right away, baffling my parents with the laughter I could hardly suppress.

I'd started going to SF conventions when I was 14, and they were pretty much the only place I felt able to meet boys I was interested in -- I went to a very small school, and it was far too close a community for it to be comfortable, plus the few geeky boys didn't meet my standards for cute, so much.

I was interested in Tarot and Wicca and pretty serious about it. I slept with my deck under my pillow.

I am sure I must have watched television but all I can remember are old Monty Python episodes on public television, and Remington Steele with my mother.

Labyrinth. David Bowie. Waiting in line all day for Star Trek IV, and playing jacks with my friends to keep from being bored.

I have my diaries from high school. I'll mine them for you in e-mail, if you can tell me what you want.

[humming-along.livejournal.com]

I was 15 and lived in Birmingham, Alabama, where I had been born and raised. I was struggling with massive issues of gender identity, but I'll try to leave those out of my perceptions, as they're probably not helpful in context.

I was heavily into new wave and goth music and shunned anything mainstream. The character Ducky from the Movie Pretty in Pink was my idol, and I wore lots of baggy black trousers and oversized men's sport coats with shirts that didn't match, all from the thrift store. Star Hits magazine was my guide for music, fashion, what was cool in every aspect of life. I lived for the Cure, the Smiths, the Cocteau Twins, the Damned. My reading at the time was Barbara Hambly, Charles Delint, Robert Heinlein, Tolkein, Emma Bull. The first Highlander movie came out on VHS and me and my friends watched it, god, seemed like practically every weekend.

I went on my first date that year, and saw the movie Adventures in Babysitting. Angel Heart came out that year, and it was my first introduction to horror that was anything besides a slasher film. The Princess Bride came out and it was delightful and full of magic at an age when I was trying too hard to be cool to admit I still needed magic. Star Trek, the Next Generation started that year and was my first introduction to the Trekverse, and the beginning of a lifelong love affair.

I had also recently gotten connected to the SCA via my 7th grade English teacher. As a lifelong fantasy fan, it was a dream come true and I lived and breathed it.

I was an alien in school. I had no interest in football or very little in dating or relationships. I had few friends my age, prefering the company of the adults in the SCA. I eventually over my high school career gathered together a marvelous company of freaks and geeks who liked the same things I did and thought I was cool and hip and ahead of my time.

Other impressions are that the fashion was terrible. It was the year of jeans cuffed as tight as possible at the ankles and high top sneakers. For girls, leggings and volumous sweaters were the norm. Stirrup pants were in fashion.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Just curious, do you still like Jon Cryer in "Two and a Half Men?"

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

When The Niece (then age 16) was staying with us, it was 1985, I think. She was a passionate fan of Sting and Miami Vice, and had a sarcastic streak of not unreasonable size.

1987 was the year War for the Oaks came out, so Prince was a Big Deal (though the fashion magazines gave credit to the movie Amadeus for the tapestry and velvet and the ruffled shirts all over their pages). There were leggings and nice low-heeled soft leather pull-on boots, so you could dress like a fairie prince if you had a mind to.

[laurel]

FWIW I think stirrup pants were even more prevalent than leggings at some point there tho both were popular. I remember being the first in my high school to have stirrups when I started my freshman year (I graduated '89).

I've always wondered if Prince was as much of an influence elsewere as in the Twin Cities; it was a huge deal here. My best friend was giant fan; we were at a very small small town Lutheran school and it was a big deal even there.

We also always requested The Time at school dances 'cuz we just had to hear "Jungle Love" and "The Bird" along with all the Prince faves. We were scolded at a roller rink when we requested "Darling Nikki"! (Gosh, I think we figured we were asking for trouble there. What wild rebels we were!)

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i was, um, 15.

i had not yet found fandom, but i read a lot, and didn't have a lot of friends. since i read a lot, i didn't care as much about not having a lot of friends. this might have been the year i found bbses, and made the fateful decision to call callahan's place instead of fire opal. ;)

i think heathers came out a few years after this, and i thought it was brilliant and really accurate. i mean, it's overdone, as black humor usually is, but i could easily imagine that happening at my high school. (hastings schools were deeply deeply cliquey. i don't know if that's endemic to schools or if hastings was particularly aggravating.)

i lived in hastings, and there wasn't anything there. there was a little tiny dreadful mall, the nearest kmart was in cottage grove, the nearest target was in st paul, on whitebear avenue. i had a bike, so i could bike around town, but at age 16 (so, 1988) i was diagnosed with arthritis, and spent a lot of that year limpy and in bed. i can talk about that, if it seems relevant. but i felt moderately trapped in hastings even before that. once i learned to drive, my parents and i fought some about that. (i once famously decided don't leave town meant don't leave the twin cities metro area when my parents thought they had explained to me not to leave hastings.)

that's what i can think of for now. if parts sound interesting, feel free to poke at them and i can throw more words at them.

[laurel]

I graduated high school in '89 and remember stuff from that era ('87 and earlier) well (particular music, TV, pop culture-- of course). And here in Minnesota the Twins won the World Series in '87 and that was a huge deal (I recall the teachers turning a blind eye when over half the students skipped school to go to the victory parade).

I'll send you email, I'll probably get wordy (go figure, eh?).

[jbru.livejournal.com]

I was in college in 1987, living in the dorms here at the U of MN and desperately unhappy. (And I don't mind recalling that, so don't worry.) One bizarre aspect of that was that the drinking age was 19 so if your dorm floor wanted to throw a party and serve beer, a majority of the people living on the floor had to be 19. I flirted with alcoholism, discovering that I could drink two cases of beer a week and not get all that drunk. The music I listened to was angry and harsh and sad; The Replacements were on constant loop. I had some friends I gamed with and I hung around at a game store in Dinkytown long enough to become an employee and make friends with Victor Raymond. Dreamhaven was in Dinkytown then, too, and I would stalk its aisles looking for things to read. I remember particularly looking for examples of very bad fantasy fiction and forcing myself to read it so that I would know what not to do when I started writing my own. (None of yours qualified, naturally.) I liked the Big 10 and always ordered a turkey sub when I ate there. I wasn't nearly as adventurous in my eating habits then as I was now and avoided the Lotus for irrational reasons. I read a lot of very good books that year but don't recall which specifically. Some of them helped me become a less angry, less self-destructive person.

Um...I just rambled a lot here

[raphaela.livejournal.com]

I was 16 in 1987 and above all, I remember feeling like the world was about to happen. I was going to a Catholic, all girls' high school in North Dallas, had just started to drive, and was obsessed with music, art and pop culture. Oh, and boys.

Reagan was in office, and regardless of his politics, I liked him because he reminded me so much of my grandfather. Also, I was old enough to remember how the hostage crisis had ended with the demise of the Carter administration, but not old enough to understand nuance, so Reagan was my hostage freeing hero.

I spent an awful lot of time worried about my looks, my clothes, my hair and my makeup. The style was huge bangs paired with a crunchy perm, blue eyeliner and mascara with pink eyeshadow, and frosted lipstick. I wasn't allowed to wear that, so I went New Wave and had the severe asymetric haircut that was boy short on the left and swung around into a chin length bob on the right. My mother had my "colors" done, so I had access to earth tones for cosmetics, but was only allowed to wear a certain amount. (And thank god, else I'd have painted myself up like Pat Benetar in that video where she's a hooker.)

Videos. MTV was a huge part of my life. I wanted to be Terri Nunn of Berlin, or Debbie Harry, or Pat Benetar. I wasn't so much into Madonna, because I thought she was contrived, and I liked my women strong and stylish without their underwear on top of their clothes. Terri Nunn had the hottest hair ever in the No More Words video.

I loved Duran Duran and since I wasn't allowed the ragwear so popular with female music artists, I adopted the Ike jacket and d-ring khakis from Duran Duran's Rio phase. My mother wouldn't let me have the white Capezio shoes I wanted (no white shoes!) so I had black and red instead. Granted, I wore a uniform daily, so my other clothes were just weekend and/or date wear. One of my favorite outfits was a long, black and tan striped sweater with black leggings--the kind that had the little ski boot hook on bottom. I wore those with black granny boots that had a little heel on them.

I was loudly pro-choice and caused a ruckus over that more than once. I read Voltaire for fun. I loved Andy Warhol and that led me to study several art movements. My best friend, Byron, and I would drive around in his Cadillac almost every night listening to Erasure, Anita Baker, The Smiths, The Cure and The Eurythmics, singing along at the top of our lungs. Then we would go to Denny's and drink coffee, and write truly awful poetry.

rambled so much LJ cut me off

[raphaela.livejournal.com]

We were the weirdest kids. Ultra-emo, but very cheerful about it.

The groups in my high school were the preppies, the cheerleaders, the goths, the science nerds, the art nerds, the drama nerds, the comedians, the stoners, the sluts (not my term for them) and the really religious girls. My best school friends were Natalie, Paige and Caroline. Natalie was stoner, Paige was a cheerleader, and Caroline was one of the girls who got pregnant our Sophomore year and disappeared for six months.

I loved dearly a girl named Jean, who grew up to join the sisterhood. I wanted to be Chandra, who was just gorgeous and sweet (and grew up to be a Sports Illustrated swimsuit/supermodel). I had a boyfriend for every day of the week, but was absolutely not putting out for any of them because I was terrified of getting pregnant (see Caroline).

I kept a scrapbook of models. I loved Paulina Porizkova, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista. I tried to find the clothes they wore. I hated my hair. I hated my androgynous look. I hated my twelve-year-old boy figure. I prayed for boobs and hips. I would negotiate with God on my grades. I stole the communion wafers and the Host from the chapel when I wasn't allowed to observe Mass because I wasn't Catholic. I talked Natalie into helping me. She cried. She thought she was going to hell.

I laughed a lot. I enjoyed my life. I found ways to amuse myself. I found jobs. I babysat. I worked at Denny's as a waitress (I was there enough, might as well get a job.) I worked at Six Flags over Texas. I worked at Express. I worked at Sears. I always wanted to work in a record store like Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, but I couldn't get hired because I wasn't edgy or cool enough.

Music was the common thread. We all watched Cosby, Remington Steel, Simon & Simon, Dynasty and Facts of Life. We passed around paperclipped copies of Danielle Steele novels, then discussed whether or not we would ever "do" oral sex. We hung out at the malls. We flirted with boys much too old for us. We ate pizza at Crystal's Pizza Parlor. We went to school dances where they always played Stairway to Heaven as the last dance because it was such a long song. We fell in love with gay boys. We helped our gay boyfriends out of the closet. We kissed each other for fun and friction.

We were indestructable. We were immortal. And we were totally frustrated that our parents didn't think so!

[janni.livejournal.com]

I was 19 most of the year, a sophomore/junior college.

A couple years earlier, when I started college, I remember purple being the in color, though hot pinks and greens were on the rise. I headed to college in cordouroy pants and a sleevesless sweater vest worn over a button-down shirt, and felt terribly collegiate for it--though by 1987, those clothes were something of an embarrassment.

I watched lots of Doctor Who.

Star Trek: The Next Generation started up. I'd never really liked the old show, liked this one less, was disappointed when I watched it, amid much excitement, with friends in a student apartment.

There was much concern on campus (Washington University) with divesting from South Africa, though we were aware we were a couple years behind the curve on that one.

There was still a Soviet Union. The Berlin wall was still up. I assumed it would be forever.

The explosion of Challenger was still strong in everyone's minds. I was a freshman when that happened, but most teens were in high school. I'm not sure I remember right, but it seems there hadn't been any space missions since then, a depressing thought at the time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My babysitter when my parents went out was a teenager in 1987. Do you know Dar Williams's song about the babysitter? (If not, I will lend you the CD, because you should hear that CD in general.) My babysitter was exactly the opposite of all of that except for the way I loved her and she loved me. She had a very awkward short floofy perm, and she was anxious all the time about stuff in the world she wasn't sure she could explain to me, hunger and poverty and disease. She had very little idea where the world was going or where she would be in it once it got there.

After that year I had no more babysitter -- really I only had her that year because we enjoyed each other's company so much -- and so I didn't interact with teenagers again much until I was friends with them.

(I have the Christmas card sitting on my desk ready to write to her. She will get a personal letter, not a form letter, and I will get one from her. I keep the people I love.)

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

First things first: head immediately to the Wikipedia entry for 1986 and the 1987 entry. Wikipedia's not perfect, but you can check any factual claim in other places, and it should bring back a raft of memories. For example, according to Wikipedia, James Tiptree, Jr., died that year. Don't miss the sidebars near the top for things like notable music things in 1986 (pop culture).

I was no longer a teenager in 1987 (I graduated college that year), but I do remember being concerned about nuclear war, given that Reagan was still in office, as well as worrying about AIDS, which had become news just a few years before. Ryan White was big news then, and I wondered which of my friends might die from AIDS. Someone who had not been sexually active before hearing about AIDS might thank their lucky stars, and those who had become sexually active and not used safe-sex practices—or used injected drugs like heroin—would have had real worries on their mind (and possibly guilt depending on their behavior). You can assume that there would have been a lot of misinformation at the time about transmission, among teens.

Students in the majority of states had graduation exit exams (called 'minimum competency exams'), but there was not nearly the extent of high-stakes testing as currently exists, and states were starting to raise graduation requirements in the mid- and late-80s primarily through course requirements (e.g., requiring two years of math and science instead of half a year of math and one year of science). 1987 was just three years after the release of a major report called A Nation at Risk, which claimed the country's economy was threatened by "a rising tide of mediocrity." The factual claims were false, but it did set a different tone, and some administrators might have been mouthing the rhetoric in 1987.

Good luck, and have fun!

[kazoogrrl.livejournal.com]

I was 12 in 1987, in 6th then 7th grade. I lived in Laurel, MD (about 20 minutes south of Baltimore).

I was coming out of my kidhood and really starting ot do the things I loved, though they did not necessarily make me popular with others. I went from my group of friends being top in the school to in the middle socially, and I was at the bottom rung of that group. I was very passionate about human rights, and was a member of Amnesty International, which I found out about through my obsession with U2 (who I got to see in concert that year, which was the highlight of mylife at that time). I was allowed to spend a lot of time in school with the "Resource Teacher", who was a woman who was there as sort of an education guide for students who wanted to work on independant projects. I developed a board game, called "Destination Unknown" (what was it about? No clue!). I liked to wear tie dyed shirts my brother brought me from Grateful Dead shows, jeans or black cords tucked into knee high suede boots, and an assortment of hats (my clothes were not popular).

I wrote a lot of poetry on my parents manual typewriter and in various notebooks. I took horseback riding lessons one a week, and went camping with my parents on the weekends. I read all the time, mostly fantasy or non-fiction that caught my interest, and my interest in paganism was just starting. I liked to stay up in the the early morning and sleep until noon. I remember watching a lot of MTV, and I listened to U2, Def Leppard, Fleetwood Mac, Guns N Roses, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., Sting, Bruce Hornsby and the Range and a lot of the older New Wave music I had around. I had a small retro pink and aqua cassette player and a kids record player.

I ate middle of the road American food. We didn't eat out alot, my mom cooked most nights: chicken, casseroles, meatloaf, salads, some packaged foods. When we ate out it was seafood (crabs usually) or Chinese. Sometimes we'd drive into the city and go to Lexington Market (a huge indoor market) or go out for Italian food.

I remember being very concerned about the world, worried at school, alienated from the people around me, and really wishing I could just get away from it all. I liked boys but was too shy to approach them (and later I realized that year I had my first crush on a girl, my older brother's GF). I felt like I could do important things in the world, and was waiting to grow up and get to them.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Oh, I was also just making my way onto the net in 1987, through my university computer account; very few people without university ties seemed to have computer access at all.

I sent hours and hours and hours of my life playing text-based computer games, mostly Adventure and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Thanks to the campus computer labs, I'd stopped writing papers on my old electric typewriter, and wrote them in WordStar instead--I had one 5 1/4 inch floppy disk with the program on it, and another to store all my papers.

The printouts were mostly dot matrix, of course.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

In 1987 I was 32 and spent nine months in the hospital with the first renal failure (and stroke and coma), however, in the years before that, I volunteered with at-risk teens on evenings and weekends.

They got referred to the program by teachers, mainly, when they saw a kid start to slide in grades, or to have bad friends, or to act out. Sometimes they came because social services had been checking out their homes.

We did a lot of things that required both self-confidence and teamwork. Outdoors: hiking, caving, rappeling and climbing, canoeing, etc. Indoors: thinking games and volleyball. Many of the kids rebelled at having to spend time with us.

The kids mostly listened to pop music, very loud. There was one boy with a fancy sports car and everybody wanted him to take them home afterward and they were all angry when we wouldn't let anybody go with him because he was a really lousy driver (I heard later that he'd had a big accident). The drug of choice was alcohol and they would try to sneak some into the sodas after they opened them. We had one Filipino girl who was so fastidious she had to wipe down or wash the top of the soda before drinking it. Pizza was always the big hit for food.

They would try to freak adults out, including us, with hairstyles and colors, clothes, jewelry, and piercings. I don't freak out easily, so I usually got the most extreme kids in my group.

I knew some of the kids were just doing time -- staying with us until they'd be allowed to stop -- but others turned out to be genuinely interested in what they did with us. Every so often, I felt that I had actually helped a kid become more, better, stable. I still hear from some of them.

[tamago.livejournal.com]

I was fifteen in 1987, midway through high school. Living in the SF Bay area of California. The spring of '87 I'd had my tonsils out after two years of minimal attendance at school (though still very good grades) so I think my teen-aged sense of alienation was magnified. I never felt unliked or unwelcomed (except for when that rumor about me being a narc got hold of popular imagination) but I was always after that an outsider.

Most of what I remember is images without much emotion. I remember the pink-and-purple clothing of two years earlier had been supplemented and nearly supplanted by an overgrowth of teal, but had not yet given way to the newly popular bright neon "glow in the dark" colors that I only see now on hilighter pens. Black, white and red graphic patterns (black and white checkerboards with red squiggles, for example) were on binders, folders and, as I remember, someone's "bachelor" (shhh... read: gay) uncle's newly designed kitchen. "The 1950's" were considered cool, but expression of this was mostly limited to popular girls dressing in poodle skirts on Halloween and a fondness for graffitti that tried to emulate chrome. I think the student union tried to organize a sock hop at one point, but missed the idea entirely as I heard that attendees were forbidden from removing their shoes.

As humming_along commented above, the girls' silhouette was tight pants and huge tops (sometimes hanging off one shoulder.) Sweatshirts with cute graphics on them coordinated with stirrup pants were popular with a certain subset. Big hair was also popular, particularly with the spanish-speaking population of my high school. Big chunky plastic jewelry was popular.

There was the guy in my history class who dressed like Robert Smith, complete with too much eyeliner and scraggly hanging forelock. All the other guys wore dockers pants and either t-shirts of button shirts. For formal occasions, very, very skinny ties were popular, as was the mullet hairstyle with the short front and the long back. I remember one kid showing up in his new "nice" outfit all in shades of olive green and dark tan, with the skinniest bronze colored tie. Kids took a lot of their fashion cues from MTV, and you could tell the difference between kids who watched cable at home and kids who only watched cable when they visited a friend by how they dressed.

I worked at the school library, helping to tidy the last transition from card catalog to electronic checkout system. We had magnetic-strip security devices at the door to keep people from stealing books, but not all the books had their magnetic strips in them yet. But libraries were still just books and you could often find some amusing older books that I don't see in libraries today. I went through a period of reading ettiquette books aimed at teenagers in the 1950's and 1960's about how to wash your hair once a week and how to gain popularity in your "set".

One of my brothers (three years younger) spent a lot of time on electronic bulletin boards with a dial-up connection on a computer that we thought horribly impressive for having more than 16 colors. I remember my brothers ate a lot of Doritos chips and read "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Video games were either text based (Zork, Bard's Tale and it's spawn) or fairly two-dimensional graphics.

Aspartame was in every soda, and I was unusual in not choosing to drink the diet option. (Actually, I didn't much like soda at all, which was fairly unusual.) I knew an older woman who used saccharine tablets in her coffee. Cancer risk was more acceptable than getting fat. I remember girls in gym class complaining, "I wish I were anorexic." These were the girls who also pulled their sweatpants over their jeans so they had more time to fix their hair after P.E., and of course, rarely broke a sweat during exercises. It wasn't ladylike.

Hope this is amusing, if not useful.

[annaoj.livejournal.com]

I was 16 in 1987. I went to a math-science-computer magnet high school in San Diego, so I don't think I had a typical high-school experience--for example, we weren't allowed to have sports teams. I was obsessed with U2's Joshua Tree album, and would play my cassette of it over and over and over. I saw them in concert at the L.A. Coliseum that spring. The spring of 1987 was also when our Science Olympiad team made it to nationals (at Ohio State) and we won second place. The summer of '87, I spent the early part of the summer working at a local enrichment summer school; then spent 3 weeks on a oceanographic research ship with my dad; then our family took a family vacation in Hawaii. I had my walkman with me, and listened to The Cure's Disintegration album constantly. I made my best friend wait to see The Lost Boys until I'd gotten back from Hawaii, so we could see it together. In the fall of '97, I was on the National Constitution Competition team, and we started getting ready for competition that January. My specialty was the Declaration of Independence, and we prepared talks on, among other things, Roe vs. Wade.

I actually have a couple of videotapes that I made in '87 and '88, where I'd tape my favorite videos off of MTV. A sampling of what's on the tape from '87:
Local TV coverage of our '87 Science Olympiad team.
Videos of songs by U2, Suzanne Vega, The Bangles, Crowded House, Peter Gabriel, Sinead O'Connor, INXS, The Cure, 10000 Maniacs, Ziggy Marley, Morrissey, Tracy Chapman.
Footage of U2 at the '87 Grammy Awards.
The comedian Bobcat Goldthwait imitating Bono of U2.

[lavenderbard.livejournal.com]

I mostly tell people that I never got a chance to be a teenager (but that I don't mind that much, because as far as I can tell most of the stuff I missed wasn't worth experiencing in the first place). I am right in your desired demographic however, I was in high school at the time. Hmm...

That might have been the year that I overheard a girl going on about how the black hair dye she used was ruining her hair. (I don't remember being familiar with the term, but I assume she was a Goth?) I thought that was about the dumbest thing I had ever heard, and I guess my opinion must have shown on my face because she got angry with me and threatened to beat me up after school, demanding to know my bus-stop. I thought this was just as dumb and just as funny as someone deliberately ruining their hair just so it would be the "in" color. I told her she was welcome to try, and willingly told her my stop, but warned her that she would have to wait there for a very long time because I had catch-up work to do in the artroom after school. She didn't wait.

[ckd]

In 1987, I was 16/17 and a freshman/sophomore at Boston University. (Well, except during the summer, when I was back in Washington state having my heart broken.)

Particular memories: my first convention (Boskone. Yeah, that Boskone; while there, I met Mike Ford for the first time); getting together with friends to watch the first season of Star Trek:TNG (and being annoyed when one episode is pre-empted for live coverage of "baby Jessica" getting rescued from the well); getting my first CD player, and discovering 10,000 Maniacs with "In My Tribe" and U2's "The Joshua Tree"; trips to Harvard Square to buy SF books at the so-small SF specialty bookstore above the Wursthaus; trips to the original Newbury St. location of Newbury Comics (back when they were mostly a comic store) to buy the latest Marvel titles, then stopping for sushi at the Japanese grocery across the street; seeing a row of magazine covers with TIME's "Iran-Contra: can Reagan survive?" next to Business Week's "Disney's Magic".

[cliosfolly.livejournal.com]

I was 12 in 1987, and the local video store still had betamax tapes as well as VHS on the shelves: I was wildly enamored of Tom Cruise in "Legend" (1985) and watched it over and over. Madonna was one of the big names on my (rather paltry) music horizon, as was Michael Jackson, whose nose was beginning to look obviously contrived. The Challenger had blown up on my birthday and there were no space missions in 1987; I'd gotten very interested in astronomy in the wake of the Challenger mission, so this was unsettling.

I still had the occasional nightmare about the possibility of nuclear war. Gorbachev was somewhat newly on the scene and both interesting and rather threatening as far as political figures went.

I was in middle school, feeling very grown up about the change from one teacher/one classroom to schedules I could design, and I was eying high school apprehensively as both potentially interesting but also something with high-stakes pressure (where I lived, we were being told by seventh grade that if we couldn't stay in the top 10% of our class in our first year in high school, our chances of getting into a good college would be damaged).

Waldenbooks and B. Dalton's were the local major bookstores, and Domino's Pizza was popular. There was a Max Headroom game for the Commodore 64; our C64 was on its last legs (we'd gotten it in '84, IIRC), but we had tons of games for it.

Book-wise, Mercedes Lackey's first Valdemar book was published in '87, and I found it and Anne McCaffrey's Pern books at the same time: psychic, intelligent, human-bonded dragons and horses! I reread them obsessively. Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear books were really popular then, too, and I would hide out in the stacks of our local library to read the third: my mother had asked me to stop reading the first, so #2 and #3 I read on the sly. They were the first sexually explicit books I'd ever read. I learned about oral sex and rape from them, neither of which ever got discussed in school sex ed classes.

Nerds candy was popular, as were pop rocks; tv-wise, I was moving away from cartoons (I stopped watching them in '87 as I began to read more heavily) and more into tv. My brother hogged the TV, watching MTV. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular, but to be sneered at if you were my age and had a middle school locker of one's own. Decorating the locker was very important, because you wanted everyone nearby to have the right idea of who you were when you opened it and they could see it. New Coke was out and about. Layered hair styles were popular, as were poofy bangs. Pastels were popular; I had to get my first pair of eyeglasses in 1987 and the lenses were clear plastic shading to pink. A Chesapeke Bagel Company shop opened in my town and I had a bagel for the first time; it was described to me as a breakfast type of role particularly popular or invented by Jewish people in NYC. We were a year or two out from getting our next computer, a Pentium 285.

I have GOT to get my eyes checked...

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

I could not figure out why you wrote, "You people are completely stupid...", and then went on to be so complementary.

Then I figured out what you really wrote...

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

I was thirteen and I was in eighth grade. O my lord I was wearing those Converse hightops in two different colors and those scrunch socks like mini-legwarmers and tucking my pants legs into them. Also I was morris dancing with a children's team but that was probably super-atypical.

We didn't have a TV and I was missing everything but by then I was proud of it. I didn't learn a lot of the major eighties hits until college when they were retro.

I still thought nuclear war was probable. Remember Sting's song, about the Russians loving their children too? And like someone else up there, when the Berlin Wall came down I was so surprised, I didn't really understand how that kind of political transformation could occur. So in 1987, it didn't even occur to me that that kind of thing could change. We had a computer with two 5.25" floppy drives and you had to put the boot disk into one and then you could put your data disk into the other. I'm pretty sure I have that timing right.

I didn't get a Nintendo until my dad inexplicably bought one a couple years later, but Super Mario Brothers came out in 1985. Probably everyone else in the world was playing it in 1987. We played it with the Nintendo set plugged into an old Apple IIe monitor until the plugs broke, and then we superglued them back together until THAT broke, and then I think we went back to reading books.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1971. I was a sophomore in 1986-1987.

The mid-eighties to me: leggings, elf boots, parachute pants were over by then, Laura Holt, Remington Steele, Guns N Roses, Queensryche, the Violent Femmes, that horrible song about "don't tell me no lines and keep your hands to yourself", Johnny 5 is Alive!, Robert Plant makes a comeback, Cola Wars!, Michael Jackson, miltucolored jeans with zippers on the calves so you could wear them too tight to get your feet through (I had a white pair with palm tree print and a black pair with yellow paisleys), the prep girls wore white turtlenecks with micro prints and pastel v-neck sweaters over them, the gold chain with a tiny charm pulled out at the neck to hang under their chins, spandex (omg, spandex), hair bands, heavy metal, Miami Vice, Dungeons and Dragons, Walkmen, earbuds, Depeche Mode, acrylic fingernails, Reeboks (in festival colors--I had a yellow pair and a pink pair), mushroom perms, Grace Jones, MTV, cable, the cool kids were just starting to have their own CD players, silver markers that you had to shake and shake to get to work, and which left a colored ring around the edge of the lettering, brown paper school book covers, French II, Roy Rogers bacon double cheeseburgers, cutting class to go to 7-11, buying condoms and trying to look older, staying out all night (all mu friends drove old beat up Rabbits or Dodge Darts), Photo I&II classes, my grandfather dying after a long decline, walking up the frozen hill to the school in winter and finding a shrew that has somehow gotten trapped on the ice between snow drifts (and rescuing it after trapping it in my scarf), "Lee press-on-breasts" (running joke about the horrible shoulderpads that were so in style and that everybody cut out of their clothes)--with the Lee Press On Nail commercials), Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, Monty Python, THUNDARRR THE BARRRBARIAN!, the Sugar Cubes, Sinead O'Connor, ninjas, the last gasp of the independent local TV station that showed monster movies in the afternoons, the beginnings of Fox network, getting cable TV (HBO!), Purple Rain, video disc players, Burt Reynolds movies at two AM interspersed with thermal window informercials, drama club, Aerosmith vs. Run-DMC, stock market crash, Jim & Tammy Faye, AIDS, Lee Iacocca, Preppies burnouts jocks and brains, catsup is a vegetable, Pizza day in the cafeteria!, Madonna, U2, Weird Al, THE BREAKFAST CLUB!!!!!, Beauty and the Beast, Moonlighting, Star Trek TNG, Glasnost, "We begin bombing in five minutes," The Day After, reading Hiroshima in sophomore english, Airwolf, Knight Rider, being absolutely certain I would die in a nuclear war before I was twenty-five.

Television stations that still signed off with the national anthem at the end of the night. Bars and signal. Johnny Carson. David Letterman, good night.

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

My daughter was 15 in 1987. It was a tempestuous year. I'll send you details in an email, and I'll also pass this along to her. (She works in Minneapolis and lives in Maplewood, btw....)

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I was nine in 1987, and I didn't know anyone in your target demographic (then or later), but this reminds me of a conversation I had on IRC the other week ... we were talking about things we remember from early childhood, and it transpired that the people in channel could be divided into two categories: those for whom the name "Imelda Marcos" immediately brings up the mental image of hundreds if not thousands of shoes (my age and older), and those for whom it doesn't (four to seven years younger than me). Me and my cohort were all going "We're OLD."

There must be things like that for people in your target demographic too, where they would immediately have an association, I wouldn't, and they would have to go "We're OLD." But of course I have no idea what they are.

[chamois-shimi.livejournal.com]

There must be things like that for people in your target demographic too

The Challenger explosion. That defines middle school for me- that was 1986, not '87, but close enough I think. It was my friend's birthday, and when we got to homeroom the teacher (Mrs. Wickersham, the science teacher) had the TV on, and they were showing the footage. It was horrifying.

The Columbia disaster really resonated with me, really affected me because of Challenger 17 years previously. Perhaps with other people my age, too, I don't know. This is part of something I wrote post-Columbia:

"The realization that a handful of lives lost in the great undertaking of our age are but fallen leaves compared to the whirlwind of terror and hatred and anger is a tragedy in itself. Every life ought to be mourned. Every tragedy should grieve our nation’s soul. Every stumbling block in the dream of stars ought to be met with fierce determination and defiance."