The Class of '86

Twenty years ago today, twenty freakin’ years, I graduated from high school. Like, O’migod! I can’t believe it. It sill stuns me. I just sat here for three minutes staring at my screen in awe, wonder, disbelief and abject fear at what I just wrote. Wow. The Class of ’86, without question, the best class there is, has been out in the world for 20 years now.

Granted, this didn’t just hit me. The realization that I’m getting older has been hitting me upside the head for a few years now. I’ll be watching a movie, say Karate Kid or Ghostbusters, or we’ll be driving down the road and Van Halen’s "Panama" comes on the radio and I’ll turn to my wife with the horrified realization that “This is years old!” to which she won’t even lower the newspaper when she mutters “Yeah, so?”

Nostalgia geeks are so unappreciated.

My latest voyage into the depressing realization that my youth and I are getting further apart when The Go-Go’s were on the Today show a week or two ago to promote the twenty-fifth anniversary of "Beauty and the Beat". What? I can still remember Paul Poole telling an inappropriate joke based on a song from this album to Ms. Coker, our art teacher in 8th grade (Why can’t the Go-Go’s have sex? Their Lips Are Sealed.) Who approved my youth to be relegated to reunion/anniversary tours, VH-1 specials and horrid attempts to recreate the past (we won’t even go into the remaking of Revenge of the Nerds – yet!).

I mean, just look at what happened in 1986 alone! In January, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. A friend of mine named David Chapman who wanted to be an astronaut was in morning for days from that. The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl reignited nuclear anxiety for some of us. I can remember Greg Drake coming into our classroom and saying “See you in Libya!” after the United States bombed Tripoli. Corizon Aquino and her yellow dresses takes over the Philippines.

Our TV sets, on which we had been watching "The Cosby Show", "Family Ties" and "Cheers", now played host to an overweight, Oscar-nominated actress named Oprah Winfrey. A whole new network was born that thumbed its nose at what was considered “decent,” drawing the ire of religious leaders and airing cutting edge shows, thereby cementing FOX, the bad boy of the networks, as a lasting incarnation on our TV. That is, when we were watching TV and not playing our new Nintendo Entertainment System which also emerged that year, bringing about the logical evolutional step from a nation of coin-operated video game fanatics to console-game fanatics.

In the theaters, we watched Top Gun, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, Aliens, The Golden Child (my first date with Sheila Pack), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (and best of the Star Trek movies), Karate Kid II (why didn’t they stop there?). We the radios, we had Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love”, Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach”, “Kiss” by Prince & the Revolution, Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” and oh so many more! Not to mention that weddings and music recitals were forever more to be plagued by Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All”, number one on the charts the day we graduated. On behalf of the class of ’86, let me offer a collective “Sorry!” to all future generations for that last one.

I learned some very important life lessons in 1986. Never drink Bartyls & James wine coolers on an empty stomach. Never drink any wine cooler that comes in a two-liter bottle. Never take Alka-Seltzer for a hangover. Needless to say, I got drunk for the first time in 1986. Not the first time I had drank, just the first time I regretted it.

One week from today will mark 20 years from the date I said goodbye to the house I had grown up in as we moved 400 miles away to South Carolina on my 18th birthday. I was supposed to come back and go to college with about one third of my graduating class who were all going to the same school, but I was tempted away with the promise of a car should I stay in South Carolina. I can’t help but wonder how my life would have been different had I gone back. Then again, that fall I met a bunch of guys in college who, twenty years later, I still call all of them friends.

We all always have regrets about things we could have or should have done or said. I never learned to play a musical instrument. I never got involved in sports. I let people walk all over me and didn’t stand up for myself. I graduated never having told that one girl that I had a crush on her since I was four. We all had dreams and plans and visions, most of which were never actualized. At least not yet. I suppose there’s still time for me to become an actor in the movies. And write a book. Travel the world.

Maybe there’s still time for some of these things. I hope. I’m have dozens of writing projects going on. Maybe one of them will turn into a book. Or I could finish one of my screen plays and make my way to Hollywood. Then I could travel the world. Who knows what else? I’m only 38 for crying out loud.

I think that’s the secret of nostalgia. It’s OK to look back, just never stop moving forward.