Watching The Cosby Show is dredging up all sorts of memories of the 80s for me. It was such an...angular decade. Every one's hair and clothes had so many geometric patterns and angles. And there were all those little plastic accoutrements too: banana hair clips; those rounded pyramid ones that scraped your hair up into a huge pony tail (draped to one side, of course); and slinky bracelets!

Also my beloved fourth-grade red jellie shoes!

The red princess slipperish ones, not those ugly clunky platform sandal things, mind you.

In looking for that jellie picture, I found one of those "You are a child of the 80s if..." lists, and, sadly, it really hit home. Atari, My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, She-ra, Pee Wee's Playhouse, Shirt Tails, first-run episodes of Saved By the Bell, Hammer pants, NKOTB, crimping irons that turned your hair into little triangles, Short Circuit, Vanilla Ice, fancy vests over T-shirts, oversized shirts with cloth belts...

I wouldn't go back for the world, except maybe to rubber-neck, but sometimes I do miss the pink plastic, sea foam green matte, electric turquoise neon materialism of the decade (best encapsulated in "Over Our Heads," the boutique o' totally useless crap run by the Facts of Life girls).

Yet I'm also a child of the 70s, with a box of Garanimals in the attic to prove it. And a set of

I love those so much more than the scary 80s set (which was all yuppies and Flashdance knock-offs). My favorite girl to make always wore grey almost bell-bottom pants with a maroon turtleneck. I thought that was the classiest outfit ever...and lo and behold, today I have that very outfit in my actual closet!

The most fun I ever had with Fashion Plates, however--aside from doing them on long car trips to and from Houston to visit relatives, and that time my overachieving Dad made a bunch of them with all sorts of shading and multi-layered colors and textures (meanwhile I was focusing on coloring within the lines...being six and all)--was a couple of springs ago when a friend of mine had massive surgery, and I came over one Saturday while she was recuperating to help her if she needed to pick up anything and to have a Fashion Plates playdate.

At first we were just fooling around with them, sort of getting our hand back in, if you will (she making little punk rocker ones; I being all preppie/Catholic school girl, as is my wont), but then we made one that accidentally resembled one of the other people in our graduate program. And a little light went on over our heads, and the next thing you know we had made pages and pages of voodoo Fashion Plates, all pointedly skewering the 'fashion sense' and catch-phrases of our fellow students. We were laughing nonstop for five hours, but unfortunately it's one of those things where the humor doesn't translate unless you have spent months and months in class with these people, listening to them hold very inappropriate private cell-phone calls in the middle of class, and having them bore everyone with their medical crisis du jour, and watching them relate every effing thing anyone ever says back to their pet theorist, Lacan, like that porcupine in Dilbert who advocates sticking customers with quills, because that is all he knows how to do. The best part was that we didn't have that many pants bottoms (all the fashion plates being girls, and in the late 70s, after all) so many of the boys had to have the disco roller skate legs with rainbow socks. Which worked well for our hippie, Phish-loving, kept his white-boy dreds in for months until the hair in them rotted away fellow classmate. I think we also drew him blowing bubbles.

She's moving abroad next year so she and her husband can do research in Germany. I should really borrow those pages and make color copies for myself. Maybe that will help me deal with the fact that the 80s are over except on Nick-at-Nite and in my toy stash in my parents' playroom