Pink and Pearls

I was flipping through channels last night and stumbled across "Pretty in Pink" on VHI Classic.  My first reaction was "Wow, James Spader's character is pretty much the same smug ass that he plays now on the Office, just 25 years younger, playing a very old-looking high school student wearing a white leisure suit."
Then I spent the next hour and a half watching and drifting lazily back to my high school days, when feathered hair, strands of pearls and turned up collars were all the rage.  Sigh, nothing like the 1980s.

I remember going to see this movie with my friends.  It was 1986 and our ages ranged from fifteen to seventeen. I'm sure we spent hours teasing, feathering and spraying our hair, pegging our jeans, and slapping on blue eyeshadow and frosty pink lip gloss for the occasion.  I never understood my friends who swooned over Andrew McCarthy's character "Blaine" - to me he seemed a little standoffish and wimpy and I didn't find him to be all that attractive.  One of my friends was in love with "Ducky", Jon Cryer's quirky character who rode his bike everywhere, lived by himself in a dirty old room where he slept on a mattress and followed Molly Ringwald's character around like a lost puppy.  Not for me either - kinda lovable but too dorky and too needy.

But I LOVED Molly Ringwald.  We all did.  We'd already fallen in love with her after "Sixteen Candles" where she had had achieved the unthinkable - landing the hottest guy in school who, like James Spader in "Pretty in Pink", just looked too freaking old to be in high school.  But Molly was like one of us.  She actually looked like she could be in high school.  We identified with her so much that one day after school my friend Leda and I spent the afternoon dressing up in Molly-type outfits, teasing our hair and then having her grandmother take photos of us in the backyard.  Busha was so cool.

Me and Leda, posing in the backyard.

Leda even looks a bit like Molly here.  I'm not sure who I'm channeling . . .

Ah, yes - the glorious days of youth.  Molly also played the spoiled princess in "The Breakfast Club", but I'll always remember her best as the self-conscious teenager in "Pretty in Pink" whose entire world revolved around whether Blaine would call her or not.  I remember the days before caller id and call waiting when I'd wait anxiously for some guy to call  - every time the phone would ring my heart would stop and then sink a bit when I realized it wasn't for me.  We all related to "Andie" and her desire to be part of the in-crowd, to land the guy no one thought she could have, to be someone special.  Our hearts filled with hope when it turned out that Blaine really saw her for who she was.

My favorite outfit in tenth grade was a long button down pink shirt (collar turned up), acid washed pegged jeans, keds and a long strand of pearls.  My sister still makes fun of me for those pearls to this day, but I don't care.  They made me happy.  I think I'll go listen to "If You Leave" by OMD while I tease my hair a bit and dance around 80s style.