Losing our youth
Our lives are marked by so many different things. They’re marked by our families and friends, our educations and our careers, even our hobbies and our pastimes.
But they’re also marked by something a lot more frivolous, perhaps, but just as real.
They’re also marked by our cultural icons, and I, and the rest of the trailing edge of the Baby Boomers and the front wave of the Generation X’ers, lost two of our own last week.
Farrah. There have been one-name celebrities before, and there will be again, but she was one of ours. Just the name summons up a blinding vision of gleaming teeth, bouncing hair, and a picture that was taken in a clearly freezing studio.
“Charlie’s Angels” was such a strange combination of things when it burst on the scene in 1976. It portrayed strong women as private detectives, doing a man’s job, but most frequently doing it in a swimsuit or high heels and while dangling on a string wielded by an invisible wealthy older man.
There was Kate Jackson as Sabrina, smart, but still sexy; and there was the drop-dead beautiful Jaclyn Smith as Kelly. And then there was Farrah as Jill, bouncy, perky, the girl-next-door, but bigger and better than life.
And then came the infamous poster. Girls of a different era had to compete with Betty Grable or Marilyn Monroe’s famous posters. We had Farrah, in boys’ lockers, or boys’ dorm room walls, everywhere. She had the teeth, she had the hair, she had the smile, she had the, well, everything, including being married to Lee Majors, the $6 Million Man himself, and the focus of one of my youthful crushes. (Sigh...)
And there was Michael Jackson. The round-faced little brother of the Jackson Five with the big voice was around when I was a kid, but he bore no relationship in the early 1980s to the intense man that wowed us, now the MTV generation, with his exciting moves, his piercing eyes and those curls! We shivered to “Thriller” and were titillated by pelvis moves that were a direct reflection on Elvis’ moves, which no doubt shocked and thrilled our mothers.
Life goes on, and Farrah and Michael passed off my radar screen as I had more important issues, such as raising four children, to occupy my mind. Every once in awhile one of them would pop up in the news, “Farrah plays ugly in TV movie,” and we would all sit and watch for two hours, and then forget her again.
Michael was more frequently, and more bizarrely, in the news, first with Bubbles the chimp, the Elephant Man’s bones and a ranch named “Neverland,” and then the amazing spectacle of watching him morph into a strangely white person with a disappearing nose.
Farrah had been in the news recently, making headlines with her battle against cancer, and again we watched, shocked at how the one-time blonde angel was slipping. Michael, well, there was news that he was heading back out onto the road, and we waited to see what he was going to be this time around.
And now we’ll never know. Within hours of each other, the two, first Farrah and then Michael, were gone.
I watched the news Thursday night, and different TV programs that were on during the weekend. There was Farrah, once again beaming in that darn swimsuit, and there was Michael, moonwalking in white socks across the floor, both forever beautiful and forever young.
We don’t get to choose our cultural icons. They’re given to us by time and acclaim, but when they’re gone, we’re all a little less for it.
