In a Pandemic, I’m Pretending It’s 1985

In October, before the second lockdown, I visited a small town an hour east of San Diego called Julian. A historic mining town, its population, as of 2018, was 930 residents. I can safely say I have more cousins than the town has people.

In the eighteenth century, Julian was the only site of the gold rush in Southern California. Its “downtown” consists of a few streets flanked by old hills, immortalized as an official California historical landmark. I love towns like this.

I took my family to Julian to see fall foliage (my mask fogged up my glasses most of the time), pick apples at the famous orchards (they were closed due to the germy hands of tourists during the pandemic) and to visit a former underground gold mine (there probably should have been fewer people crammed inside for a tour). But I had my best experience in Julian at a charming consignment store.

There was nothing inside that store from the past decade, nor even the 2000s or 1990s. The most modern finds were from the 1980s. I even spotted a satin wedding dress from the 1940s. I love stores like this. In a world where every home decor ad tells you to go modern, here was a space exploding with chicken-shaped casserole dishes and colorful ice cream sundae glasses from the 1950s.

I was feeling demoralized. I wanted to pick apples, to rub cold, maskless noses in the brisk morning air or, at the very least, to have a moment to myself in the motel bathroom. The ten minutes my four-and-two-year-olds allotted me inside the consignment store while they waited in the car with my husband was a precious gift.

I knew I couldn’t stay in Julian, with its 930 people (all of them charming, I’m sure), but I didn’t want to go back to Los Angeles. The only things that get picked in L.A. are noses and pockets.

I felt depressed. I didn’t know my place in a pandemic-ridden world. But then, on a shelf full of old books and magazines, I saw it: a 1985 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine — and the Christmas issue at that.

There was a picture of a gingerbread church right on the front cover. Not a gingerbread house. Not a gingerbread studio apartment. But an actual cookie church. On the cover of a national magazine for, well, good housekeepers. As an observant Jew, I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I can keep a house. No one can dust exercise weights and fold mismatched socks faster than me.

The magazine cost $5 (despite the original $1.95 label). Had it still been 1985, I could have bought a sandwich, a Diet Coke and a cassette tape with that amount. But I purchased it anyway, having saved money on the entrance to the apple orchards.

Want to feel instant comfort and escape from the anxious reality of today? Find yourself a magazine from the 1980s. It was the decade of all things fabulous and shiny, at least on the surface.

But the fact that I completely missed the 1980s in America meant that the magazine also served as a primary source for me. While American kids were watching “Big” and gawking at Madonna videos, I was dodging deadly missiles from aerial bombardments during the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980–1988. As I perused the magazine, there was something so comforting about knowing that while I was screaming death chants against America in 1980s Iran, millions of Americans were enjoying eggnog and heaping bottles of Stetson cologne.

Maybe, in some small way, that magazine made me feel like I could time travel to live vicariously through someone who didn’t endure war and fanaticism in the tender years of childhood. Of course, I’ll admit that I had to Google a handful of pop culture references throughout the magazine. Who was Blake Carrington? And what’s a money gram?

Back home, as I devoured the glorious sea of puffy haired models and escapism, I felt the painful clutches of reality slowly release their hold on me. If you’re going to immerse yourself in any decade, it might as well be the 1980s. Since the magazine was the Christmas issue, it had three times more pages than usual, meaning that every night for four weeks, I spent half an hour before bedtime scouring through the pages, reading every single word and gazing at every image. I truly became lost in the pages.

There were coupons left and right, including one for a whopping 20 cents off Knorr vegetable soup and recipe mix. Most of the coupons had expiration dates in February or March 1986, but one coupon — for a product that isn’t even sold anymore — said “no expiration,” which left me tempted to take it to the supermarket, just to see the look on the cashier’s face. I wonder if he or she would believe I’d frozen myself in the mid-1980s and recently thawed out to claim my discount.

Naturally, there were a lot of ads for beauty products. Linda Evans (whom I had to Google) sold hair dye, Christie Brinkley sold Prell shampoo and someone at Revlon thought it’d be a good idea to name a new women’s perfume “Scoundrel Musk.” It was all deliciously over the top and just what I needed in the weeks leading up to another soul-crushing lockdown and more debilitating anxiety over the health of my loved ones.

There were ads for telephones and stereos, including a huge, bulky cordless telephone touted for its “sleek design.” Another read, “Introducing a whole new kind of flour: all-purpose flour blended with whole wheat.” Apparently, whole wheat flour was exotic in the 1980s, and it had to be blended with regular flour just to convince Americans to try it.

In the best possible way, I’ve always believed that life itself is one big advertisement, and there’s something about looking at old ads that reveals a certain impermanence about life. I found ads for products that were wildly popular nearly 40 years ago, but few people buy (or recognize) today, like Sanka (an early variety of decaffeinated coffee), Dristan (a nasal spray) and yes, feminine douche bags.

When times are tough, there’s something undeniably soothing about the reality of impermanence. Things pass. We forget what angered us last year. In a year when I’ve often wondered if pestilence and social isolation are the new norms for years to come, it felt amazing to immerse myself in an era that had already passed.

In a year when I’ve often wondered if pestilence and social isolation are the new norms, it felt amazing to immerse myself in an era that had already passed.

One Sunday morning, I tried to read the magazine in bed, only to hear the shrieking tantrums of my kids in the other room. There was screaming, hitting and more screaming. It was pretty bad. I stopped the fight through a patented combination of reasoning, chastising and bribery. Maybe it was because my bandwidth for stress is much smaller these days, but I felt like I couldn’t access happiness for the rest of the morning. When I returned to the bedroom, I just wanted to crawl beneath the covers and hide.

But then, I saw an ad in the magazine showing a toddler playing with a Fisher-Price Tape Recorder. Had he hit his brother that morning? Was his mother as exasperated as I was? I quickly realized it doesn’t matter.

That toddler is now in his late thirties. And although I felt like I couldn’t move past that morning’s horrible brotherly fight, the thought that back in 1985, a mother felt the same way gave me great comfort. Sometimes, we have to look back a few decades to realize there’s no point in sweating the small stuff. Today, that toddler’s a grown man. And his mother’s forgotten all about his tantrums. And she probably wishes she could have bottled the magic and magnificent cuteness of his early years. I put down the magazine and went to hug my kids tightly.

In time, I realize there was also something glaring about most of the ads: They featured so much text. There was a two-page ad for NutraSweet that featured 12 bullet points alone. Who would reach such a thing today? Americans must have had longer attention spans back then. And in an internet-less world, the magazine stood in for your mother, older sister and even your grandmother, offering a lot of guidance and advice on things that today, we don’t ask actual people, but smartphones. There were even pages dedicated to refining one’s “Etiquette for the Holidays.”

And if the 1988 film “Working Girl” (which I watched in the early 2000s) taught me anything, it’s that women took their rightful seats at the workplace in the 1980s, and such a shift undoubtedly meant they were forced to juggle a home and a career more than ever before. That probably explains why part of the magazine is dedicated to “The Microwave Cookbook” for busy women. (The microwaveable recipes for lemony chicken wings, egg and caviar fingers and clams with pesto left little to be desired.) One column offered helpful advice for saving time and money by using a bold, modern solution: “Find out if your town has a food shopping service by checking your supermarket bulletin board or local paper.” A food shopping service that enables someone else to do your shopping? Unimaginable!

Everything I thought I knew about the 1980s in America was based on outliers  — the loudest celebrities, the biggest scandals and the most rebellious artists. I thought the 1980s were a wild decade of cultural revolt, but, as the magazine proved, things were actually much more wholesome. Granted, I was reading Good Housekeeping. But imagine my surprise when I opened the magazine to find an ad that showed a mother and daughter kneeling on the floor beside a father, staring adoringly into his eyes as he sat in his new leather rocking chair. I could just hear the “beep” of the microwave as it announced the completion of clams with pesto.

For better or worse, the magazine didn’t hide anything or attempt to please anyone other than the majority. There were no diet recipes; everything was fantastically full-fat. I’ll admit it was a welcome respite from the healthy recipes on my Pinterest wall these days, which include millet porridge. (Incidentally, millet is a type of seed I often fed my plethora of finches and parakeets.)

There was no skirting around the Christmas tree (no pun intended), either. The editor’s note wished everyone a “Merry Christmas!” There were cutouts of Christmas angels and step-by-step instructions for creating the gingerbread church featured on the cover. There was also a big ad for the Sally Struthers Christmas Children’s Fund, with a header that read, “Christmas is for children.” Today, that’d be a pretty bold statement that would elicit only one response: Why would anyone assume all children celebrate Christmas?

But as I made my way through the pages, it wasn’t all comfort food and Scoundrel Musk. Out of 376 pages, I found two ads featuring people of color. One showed boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard and his son holding cups of Carnation Sugar-Free Hot Cocoa Mix (and really pretending to like the flavor). Another showed a young, Black girl playing with a Black doll that looked suspiciously like a Cabbage Patch Kid but was named Huggybean. “I’m the very first doll like me,” Huggybean declared. According to the ad, the doll lived in the chocolate forest and traveled to distant lands to find her Kente Cloth (a Ghanaian and Togolese textile). I don’t even know where to start with this.

There was one mention of Hanukkah, but it was referenced by a Jewish writer who chronicled her experience fighting a terrible disease during the Festival of Lights. Not exactly uplifting and cheerful.

As painful as it is to say it this year, hindsight really is 20/20. I realize that not everything was rosy in 1985. In fact, some things were devastating: An earthquake in Mexico City killed 9,000 people. AIDS was spreading all over the world. TWA Flight 847, which left Athens for San Diego, was hijacked by Hezbollah terrorists, who separated every passenger with a Jewish-sounding name and murdered United States Navy diver Robert Stethem. The hostages were held for two weeks as Hezbollah demanded that Israel release 700 Shiite Muslim prisoners.

The Achille Lauro cruise ship, which was bound from Alexandria to Ashdod, was hijacked by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front, who murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish American who was in a wheelchair. And by 1985, 1.2 million Ethiopians were killed by famine, leaving over 200,000 children orphaned. The cherry on the horrible cake of such devastation? That year, the Unabomber killed his first victim.

Maybe while I was struggling in Iran, things weren’t so great elsewhere around the world.

Eventually, I finished the magazine, and it was time to move on. It wasn’t sustainable to escape to another era wearing rose-colored glasses. I couldn’t live in 1985 forever.

But a few days after I put the magazine away, I felt an itch. Things were still looking too bleak in 2020. Fortunately, Facebook’s algorithm offered the perfect solution: an ad for a group of people who loved escapism as much as me. On Facebook, it’s called “The group where we all pretend it’s still the ‘90s.” I immediately asked to join.

Happy New Year.

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker and activist.