Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around...

The phone rings in the middle of the night,
My father yells "What you gonna do with your life?"

What's up?

So, I'm cooking dinner the other day, and I hear this off key singing coming from the living room... "Kids just wanna have fuuu-un". I think to myself, those friggin commercials for summer parks have started already? Then I hear "When the working day is du-un... girls they wanna have fun". I proceed to ask Kayla, where'd you learn that song - and after assessing whether she had said anything that she would get in trouble for, she said, "Daddy... It's Miley Cyrus".

Wow.

Hannah Montana does Cyndi Lauper. Later on that night, I was in the shower (don't visualize lol), and I started to think back. What a wicked time period we were blessed to come up in - so much of the music... the tv, the everything was FEEL GOOD stuff...

From the Cyndi Lauper video with Captain Lou Albano video ("I'm like chillin', Monday night raw watching, me and Dan-e-o at the Skydome, when its in town ~ Choclair - Northern Touch) to the other stuff from that time period, we had it all...

And so did our girls. Well... the girls we liked. But didn't talk to, but instead chased around the schoolyard at recess. Those times, they'd be doing their thing - skipping, double-dutch, and we'd be WAAAY over the next side playing something - reda$$, dodgeball, handball, transformers (or gobots), and then we'd get haunted and go harrass them.

So they're skipping away...

Down by the river, down by thaaaaa sea,
Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me,
I told ma, ma told pa,
Johnny got a lickin' so ha ha ha!
How many lickin's did Johny get?

1, 2, 3... and we'd buss up their skipping vibes. Then the girl that you liked, would chase you, and you'd run until they got tired. They'd go back and continue...


Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around,
Teddy bear, teddy bear, touch the ground,
Teddy bear, teddy bear, show your shoe,
Teddy bear, teddy bear, that will do...


And we'd run through and BUSS up their game. They'd chase us. And sometimes we let them catch us. I was too shy. And Sheryl Chen was sooo hot - the first Chinese Jamaican I ever saw lol. But she had a big boyfriend. Brian Chuchinam. LMAO. I can't believe I remember ANY of this.

Ah... it was oh so simple then. Or we'd be playing Red Rover or was it British Bulldog. We'd be running across the field, and trying to tackle everyone was free. And sometimes, we'd hear after that someone copped a feel. And some guys would run behind a girl and pull her bra strap. That would really cause you to get chased lol.

The girls came to school with all their stuff... the equivalent of ours. My little pony... Monchichi's. Skipper (I think she was a knockoff Barbie mermaid or something). Barbie had Ken, like Oprah has Steadman, and they had a BIG house at home with like a mustang, and a horse with weave like hair lol. And they'd have a head with JUST hair and they'd braid it and style it and and...

And around when Madonna came out hard, they all wore these rubber sparkly bands on their wrists and skirts with frills and... Girls had their own dope stuff.

Sigh....

garbage pail kids...
wuzzles...
puffalumps...
sticker albums...
Cricket...
polly pocket...
secret keepers...
skip it...

I'll finish this next week... but until then, here's one of my favorite read's on the 80's. I didn't write this one, but I wish I did.

I am a child of the eighties. That is what I prefer to be called. The nineties can do without me. Grunge isn't here to stay, fashion is fickle and "Generation X" is a myth created by some over-40 writer trying to figure out why people wear flannel in the summer.

When I got home from school, I played with my Atari 2600. I spent hours playing Pitfall or Combat or Breakout or Dodge'em Cars or Frogger. I never did beat Asteroids. Then I watched "Scooby-Doo." Daphne was a Goddess, and I thought Shaggy was smoking something synthetic in the back of their psychedelic van. I hated Scrappy.

I would sleep over at friends' houses on the weekends. We played army with G.I. Joe figures, and I set up galactic wars between Autobots and Decepticons. We stayed up half the night throwing marshmallows and Velveeta at one another. We never beat the Rubik's Cube.

I got up on Saturday mornings at 6 a.m. to watch bad Hanna-Barbera cartoons like "Snorks," "Jabberjaw," "Captain Caveman," and "Space Ghost." In between I would watch "School House Rock." ("Conjunction junction, what's your function?")

On weeknights Daisy Duke was my future wife. I was going to own the General Lee and shoot dynamite arrows out the back. Why did they weld the doors shut? At the movies the Nerds Got Revenge on the Alpha Betas by teaming up with the Omega Mus. I watched Indiana Jones save the Ark of the Covenant, and wondered what Yoda meant when he said, "No, there is another."

Ronald Reagan was cool. Gorbachev was the guy who built a McDonalds in Moscow. My family took summer vacations to the Gulf of Mexico and collected "The Great Muppet Caper" glasses along the way. (We had the whole set.) My brother and I fought in the back seat. At the hotel we found creative uses for Connect Four pieces like throwing them in that big air conditioning unit.

I listened to John COUGAR Mellencamp sing about Little Pink Houses for Jack and Diane. I was bewildered by Boy George and the colors of his dreams, red, gold, and green. MTV played videos. Nickelodeon played "You Can't Do That on Television" and "Dangermouse." Cor! HBO showed Mike Tyson pummel everybody except Robin Givens, the bad actress from "Head of the Class" who took all Mike's cashflow.

I drank Dr. Pepper. "I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?" Shasta was for losers. TAB was a laboratory accident. Capri Sun was a social statement. Orange juice wasn't just for breakfast anymore, and bacon had to move over for something meatier.

My mom put a thousand Little Debbie Snack Cakes in my Charlie Brown lunch box, and filled my Snoopy Thermos with grape Kool-Aid. I would never eat the snack cakes, though. Did anyone? I got two thousand cheese and cracker snack packs, and I ate those.

I went to school and had recess. I went to the same classes everyday. Some weird guy from the eighth grade always won the science fair with the working hydro-electric plant that leaked on my project about music and plants. They just loved Beethoven.

Field day was bigger than Christmas, but it always managed to rain just enough to make everybody miserable before they fell over in the three-legged race. Where did all those panty hose come from? "Deck the Halls with Gasoline, fa la la la la la la la la," was just a song. Burping was cool. Rubber band fights were cooler. A substitute teacher was a baby sitter/marked woman. Nobody deserved that.

I went to Cub Scouts. I got my arrow-of-light, but never managed to win the Pinewood Derby. I got almost every skill award but don't remember ever doing anything.

The world stopped when the Challenger exploded.

Did a teacher come in and tell your class?

Half of your friends' parents got divorced.

People did not just say no to drugs.

AIDS started, but you knew more people who had a grandparent die from cancer.

Somebody in your school died before they graduated.

When you put all this stuff together, you have my childhood. If this stuff sounds familiar, then I bet you are one, too.

We are children of the eighties. That is what I prefer "they" call it.
Before the mortgage... before kids... before OSAP repayment... car loans, interest rates and the stresses of adult lives, we lived our lives to a Soundtrack....

Today that Soundtrack to Our Lives lives on in the most imitated, yet still never ever duplicated Toronto party - Amnesia. It all goes down next week Saturday.

Email me for $10 all night guest list at >> ian@amnesia.ca