1986

I was pacing in the emergency room, looking for something more interesting than the latest news on the New York plane crash, or the incoming storm, anything to get my mind off the things going on behind the swinging doors of the hospital where visitors were not allowed to wander; and so I drifted over to the magazine rack to peruse the periodicals. And promptly tripped into The Twilight Zone.

There were two magazines in the rack from 1986. Can't remember the name of it - Woman's Day? Ladies Home Journal? Something like that. One cover had Carol Burnett. The other had Goldie Hawn. 1986. Twenty years ago. Gosh, they both looked a bit ... old. But not nearly as old as they are now. I opened them up. The pages were slightly yellowed, aged but not too badly. The ads were hilarious. Do you remember the styles from 1986? And the products? I'd forgotten.

Reminds me of when I visited my Grandma's house back in '85 when I got out of college, and she had all these old magazines from the early '70s. That was hilarious, too, but this - ! This was twenty years later. And sitting in an emergency room waiting area!

I imagine somebody brought them in because they were reading them at home and didn't remember that they had them until they'd gotten there, and either absentmindedly or on-purpose put them in the rack. Would the hospital have kept magazines around for twenty years? Makes me wonder.

But the articles were poignantly funny. Carol Burnett's was an excerpt from her autobiography in which she related the pain of growing up with alcoholic parents. She rescued her sister from that horror by 'kidnapping' her when she was just starting to make it on Broadway. Goldie was relating how and and Kurt Russell were going to give up movies and live on a farm and be like normal people. Guess some dreams don't turn out.

Oh, and there was another poignant article in one of the issues, I don't remember which one. An interview with Lucille Ball, who was just about to debut with her new (and last) series, Life with Lucy. That series died a quick and unmerciful death, and Lucy died just a few years later (in '89, I think). I didn't find out what happened to the series until after I got home and looked it up on the 'Net, and that made it worse. Back in '86, she had such high hopes for it. She was hoping to conquer the '80s like she'd done in the '50s and '60s and '70s. Didn't happen. By 1986, her brand of humor was apparently out of fashion. Either that, or people just weren't going to buy her as a physical comedienne when her body was 76.

Odd to travel through that time warp, looking back on the hopes and dreams of yesterday, and the memories that have moved even further out from view. What would those ladies say now - those that are still alive - if they were reminded of the things they had said back in 1986, now that the intervening years have brought them on new pathways, new adventures, new heartbreaks?