Hey Girls! Summer is almost here, and I’d like to plan a mother/daughter trip. No, not to the beach or a spa. I have something way more radical in mind—something more totally awesome to the max! This summer, let’s travel back to the 80s.
We will start right after school gets out—sometime in early May. Just think! Three full months of day after endless day of chillaxing in the sun and flipping through Seventeen Magazine.
But first things first. We’ll need the right clothes. Let’s see…Esprit outfits in a variety of colors—-turquoise, fuchsia, lime green, bright yellow. Check. Giant plastic hoop earrings to match every single outfit. Check. Jellies. Check. An unflatteringly high-cut one-piece swimsuit. Check. And Walkman—it’s both fashionable and functional!
Now to fit in, we will need to work on our Savage Tans. A little baby oil and iodine ought to do the trick. We can also use Sun In to add a nice brassy orange tint to our hair. Unless we’ve just gotten perms—which we will definitely want to achieve maximum hair bigness. In that case, we will have to wait two days before we can get our hair wet.
We’ll be there a long time, so we might want to get jobs. Here are our choices: lifeguard, ice-cream shop, baby-sitter. The important thing is to find jobs that will allow us plenty of time for volleyball camp, band camp, cheer camp, ACT prep courses, volunteer hours for our college resumes, and summer reading for our upcoming AP classes. Ha! Just kidding. None of that exists where we’re going. We just need to schedule our jobs so that we don’t miss General Hospital, because remember, DVR’s do not exist yet. And neither does binge watching unless we go to the video store and rent like a whole bunch of movies. A video store is like a library only…oh never mind. I’ll explain later.
Even with our jobs and keeping up with what’s going on with Luke and Laura, we will have A LOT of free time on our hands. So there’s the skating rink, the mall, the go-cart track. But really the most fun thing is just driving around town—literally for hours. We’ll blast our cassette tapes and jam out to Bon Jovi, Prince, Guns and Roses, Bananarama, all the classics. I’ve been saving up for this, and I have like thirty dollars, so that should cover gas for the summer.
But here’s the thing. We have to be home by curfew—on the dot. I’m going to try to explain something, Girls. It might be a little confusing for you or even scary… When we are out, Grammy and Grandad won’t have any way of contacting us or tracking us. They will not be able to reach us or find us. If we want to call home, we can, but we will have to have actual money to use something called a pay-phone—no, pay-phones do not take debit cards.
Also, if we want to make plans with our friends, we will have to call them beforewe leave the house and set up a specific time and place to meet. Because (and don’t freak out) our friends will not be able to reach us or find us either. And (just breathe) they won’t know what we are doing unless they are with us. But don’t worry. We can still document all of our fun on our Disc cameras to show them later—like two weeks later once we’ve had our photos developed. To get our photos developed we’ll have to send off something called film…oh forget it. Again, I’ll just explain later.
It’s going to be so great. I’ve got a TV in my room, so we can watch MTV whenever we want. And I have my own phone. We can call our friends and talk and talk and talk. No really. That’s what phone are for in 1980-something. You’ll love it! My phone is shaped like a giant pair of lips!
I really think you’re going to love spending time in 1980-something. Sure, it might take some getting used to at first. There’s no bottled water or lattes. And you’ll have to learn to eat food you haven’t photographed. But there are so many other perks. We will sleep until 10:00 every morning (because remember, we don’t have to practice anything all summer). We’ll drink Tab, and have Pudding Pops and Pizza Rolls every day! And we will eat raw cookie dough right off the roll! I know it sounds like a cushy life, but don’t worry about putting on weight. We will be doing Jane Fonda’s workout faithfully. Oh that reminds me! I need to add neon leotards, headbands, and leg warmers to our packing list!
This summer is going to be trippendicular!
Related:
Why I Loved Being a Teen in the 80s
Great Graduation Gifts For High School Seniors
