Long, long ago...

28 years ago yesterday I forced a man I loved and three of my friends and relatives into powder blue tuxedos.*

The Rocket Scientist married me anyway.

To state the glaringly obvious, the world was a much different place in 1983.

It would be one year before the Macintosh debuted.  What would become MS Word was distributed free (on floppy disk, of course) in PC magazine. The ARPANET (which you needed to beg, borrow, or steal a number to access) officially changed to the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet.  And, although none of us would recognize it until years later, transforming all our lives.

In 1983, the total of record titles available on CD was under twenty.  Cassette tapes ruled, because you could put them in your Walkman, which at that point had been around for only four years.

The top three songs that year were "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson, "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club, and "Flashdance... What a Feeling" by Irene Cara.  The movie that the last came from had started a craze for legwarmers and torn shirts for women.  (I still have a pair of legwarmers around somewhere.) All was not easy listening, though: the Red Hot Chili Peppers released their first album.

No one had heard of Rollerblades (introduced in 1987), or grunge music. VCRs had been around less than a decade, and the movie and recording industries were, as usual, fighting tooth and nail to restrict consumers' access to them.  It would be a year before the Supreme Court ruled that yes, you could legally record that last episode of M*A*S*H, or that first episode of The A-Team.  Of course, this was before the entertainment industry came to understand that VCRs created an entirely new and very lucrative income stream for them.  And revolutionized the access that most people had to pornography.

At that time, most of us thought, mistakenly,  that Star Wars would be a trilogy.  (Some of us feel it would have been much better if it had been left as such.) We felt about the release of Return of the Jedi much as many of us feel about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.  1983 saw the release of that ode to the baby boomers, The Big Chill (such a great soundtrack),  and a prefect gem of a movie that did only so-so at the box-office but which would spawn at least one catchphrase and become an integral part of many Decembers since then, A Christmas Story.  That year also saw the release of the most annoying, soppily sentimental, and manipulative Best Picture winner ever, Terms of Endearment.

Karen Carpenter died.  Among many others, including Buckminster Fuller.  And a lot of people whose names mean something to me, but who are non-entities to my children.  Actor Jessie Eisenberg was born.



The third year of Ronald Reagan's presidency had both the invasion of Grenada and the declaration of the third Monday on January as a holiday in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
In 1983, two separate research groups, one French and one American, announced they had isolated the retrovirus that caused HIV.  The role that one strain of HPV played in the development of cervical cancer was identified.  Sally Ride broke a glass ceiling as well as the atmosphere, becoming the first American woman in space. GPS became available for civilian use for the first time, thus insuring that eventually all of my family vacations would be filled with demands from my loved ones to geocache.** 

Our world has changed in ways unimaginable in 1983.  As has my personal universe.  But the Rocket Scientist has been there through all of it.

Here's hoping he's here for whatever the world will be like twenty-eight years from now.

*It could have been worse: the really hot color that year was a sort of burgundy pink.  And my poor bridesmaids... the color was a lovely cobalt blue, but the cut of the dresses was ... well, you know how you always tell your bridesmaids that they can use their dresses later if they simply shorten them? Uh, no.

** I am the only person in my household who does not geocache.  On vacations, there tends to be as much geocaching as everyone else thinks they can get away with before I throw a temper tantrum.