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The 80s were fun, wacky and bizarre all wrapped into one decade. If you were a teen like I was, you were forced to follow General Westmoreland's lawsuit against CBS, cut out newspaper clippings on the trial and write weekly essays for your English class on libel. You did this with your Jordache handbags draped over your desk and you wore 3 pairs of socks to match the purse and pulled them over your jeans.

After school when you were supposed to be clipping Westmoreland related articles, you were secretly reading S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders" because after you saw the movie you were obsessed with the story. You were often distracted though because Nancy Reagan's "Just say no" slogan was drilled into your head and it was blasting on the TV in between Gilligan's Island and Flinstones re-runs.

If you were a teen, you'll also probably recall some guy named Oliver North and something about the country Iran, but you don't have the foggiest idea of what it was all about. You know that Iran was at war with some country called Iraq and your social studies teacher told you that Iraq was our ally. You also remember everyone talking about "Reaganomics" and "Star Wars", and you knew the latter was not George Lucas' masterpiece.

You couldn't wait for the school week to end because it meant you got to watch cartoons on Saturday morning! All week you waited to find out what mess Smurfette and the other Smurfs would get into before they were reprimanded by Papa Smurf. After the show was over, you'd flip through your sticker album and scratch your smurf "smelly" stickers that smelled like bubblegum after running your fingernail across it.

You were definitely a part of the 80s if you remember how badly you wanted your MTV. When you got it, it actually played 24 hours of music videos that kept you mesmerized for days at a time. It could be days before you remembered to eat a meal or go to sleep.

Some of your friends were spinning on their heads trying to be break-dancers. Those not spinning were desperately trying to emulate Michael Jackson's (MJ) moonwalk steps while wearing a gem studded white glove. Everyone was dancing to MJs "Beat it" and sat glued to the television waiting for the "Thriller" video to play on aforementioned MTV. A few years later "Hair band" music blasted from your radios and cassette players and while you still liked MJ, but he was getting a little weird and Dokken, and Motley Crue were way cooler anyway. Bon Jovi and Madonna were the idols of every boy and girl

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