[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the '80s. I am Meg.

[00:20] Jessica: I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:29] Meg: And where we now podcast about New York City in the 80's. I do ripped from the headlines

[00:36] Jessica: And I cover pop culture. Let's get started.

[00:38] Meg: Let's get started. Jessica, I'm a little nervous about today.

[00:44] Jessica: Well, are you? Are you prepared?

[00:46] Meg: I am prepared.

[00:47] Jessica: Are you excited or nervous? Because sometimes you can't tell the difference.

[00:50] Meg: Both. I'm excited and I'm nervous.

[00:52] Jessica: Okay. Sometimes the way I can tell is whether or not I need to pee.

[00:56] Meg: No, I do not need to pee. I'm good.

[00:57] Jessica: Okay, so you're probably more excited.

[00:59] Meg: I'm excited, but I'm also a little bit nervous because of the subject matter, so you will bear with me.

[01:05] Jessica: Oh, my God. Are you?

[01:07] Meg: It's okay. It's going to be fine. I'm going to walk you through it. Ready?

[01:11] Jessica: No, I'm not. No. Is there a trigger warning for this one other than for me?

[01:18] Meg: That's a good question. When we get there, we'll talk about it.

[01:23] Jessica: Okay, by talk about it, do you mean, say, now we're going to do a trigger warning?

[01:27] Meg: It's a complicated situation.

[01:29] Jessica: You know what?

[01:30] Meg: It's not straightforward.

[01:31] Jessica: I am not going to back.

[01:32] Meg: It's controversial. Thank you. I appreciate that. My engagement question for today is what kind of after school activities did you do?

[01:40] Jessica: This doesn't sound good. Already I like to get into vans with strangers with candy. Am I cutting to the chase too much?

[01:49] Meg: Did you take piano?

[01:50] Jessica: Okay, during our tenure in the 80's I was with you in Glee Club. Oh, my God.

[01:57] Meg: I didn't even put Glee Club on my list. Isn't that funny? Yes. We were in Glee Club together.

[02:02] Jessica: I was traumatized in Glee Club, as were you.

[02:05] Meg: I was indeed.

[02:06] Jessica: And we traumatized others, which is something I've heard about in adulthood only. Anyway, so among the many; horseback riding okay. Dance class.

[02:23] Meg: I did lots of plays after school myself.

[02:26] Jessica: I did one after school play at The Browning School. I did The Bourgeois Gentleman (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme), and they never washed the costumes. It was disgusting. Oh, and one boy got a hard on on stage. I will never forget that.

[02:41] Meg: Don't name him.

[02:43] Jessica: I couldn't if I tried, the poor thing. But it was awkward. Anyway, so, yeah, let's talk about after school activities. Okay.

[02:52] Meg: My sources are a Newsday article from 1989, a New York Times article from 2013, and do you remember Andrew Jarecki?

[03:04] Jessica: Yes.

[03:04] Meg: He is the documentary man. The guy who did The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. And he also was the guy who did Moviefone. He was the voice..

[03:15] Jessica: He was the voiceover guy - like welcome to Moviefone.

[03:19] Meg: Yeah. And he started Moviefone. It was his company. And he was the actual voice, genius. I know.

[03:25] Jessica: So, yes, I'm familiar with his work. All right, well, I pressed one for Romancing the Stone.

[03:31] Meg: He also did a documentary called Capturing the Friedmans.

[03:35] Jessica: I know about that.

[03:36] Meg: Well, let me catch everyone else up, okay? In 1987, Arnold Friedman was a 54 year old married father of three teenage boys living in Great Neck, Long Island. He'd been a super popular science teacher for 26 years at Bayside High School in Queens. When he retired, he started teaching computer classes to neighborhood kids in his basement.

[04:01] Jessica: In the basement? All right, already. Basement is my trigger word. All right, go ahead. I'm sorry.

[04:08] Meg: Hold on for a minute, because it's a complicated story, okay? His whole life came crashing down right before Thanksgiving in 1987 when a government official knocked on his front door. Three years earlier. So back in 1984, U.S. Customs officials had checked a small package in a plain brown wrapper. Inside was a magazine from Holland addressed to Arnold Friedman, and it was called Boy Love.

[04:41] Jessica: Oh, God.

[04:42] Meg: It featured low budget color photos of nude boys and graphic pictures of men having sex with children.

[04:50] Jessica: Oh, for fuck's sake, Meg. Honestly. Really? Okay, I'm going to very well behaved.

[04:56] Meg: My section is ripped from the headline and I cover true crime. This is what I do.

[05:01] Jessica: Okay.

[05:02] Meg: The postal inspector posing as some random guy named Stan. So they did a sting, right? Wrote to Arnold Friedman and asked if he had Boy Lover material to sell. Friedman responded three days later. I have none to sell, but am interested in obtaining. Do you know of any sources? So, are you following?

[05:25] Jessica: Yeah.

[05:26] Meg: Okay. And they started a correspondence, which culminated with Arnie sending Stan a magazine called Joe and His Uncle with the handwritten note Stan, enjoy Arnie. When the government officials and the Nassau police raided his home in 1987, they found a foot high stack of child pornography secreted behind a piano in the living room and child size dildos in the cabinet. They also found a list of boys aged eight to eleven who were enrolled in his after school computer classes. Any questions?

[06:04] Jessica: You had me at child size dildo.

[06:07] Meg: I thought that might get your attention.

[06:10] Jessica: Okay.

[06:11] Meg: All right. So the police went about interviewing the kids. And this is where the story gets really sticky, so just bear with me, okay. The police say the kids told them horrifying things went on in these computer classes. The kids were given pornographic magazines and computer discs called Stroker, in which the player could make a graphic representation of a man masturbate, and Strip Poker, in which a woman figure would shed clothing as the game progressed until she was naked. Now, do you remember what computer games looked like in the 80s?

[06:47] Jessica: Yes.

[06:48] Meg: Pac-Man and Mario Bros and Centipede. Highly pixelated. Highly pixelated.

[06:53] Jessica: Very crude. Yes.

[06:55] Meg: The kids said Arnie started playing nasty games with them in real life. This is a quote. "Mr. Friedman pulled my pants halfway down and he made me hold onto one of the computer table chairs. I screamed, Dad. And Mr. Friedman said to me to be quiet. Mr. Friedman put his hands over my mouth. During this time, the other kids were screaming and telling Mr. Friedman to get off me. I was scared. And the other kids were scared too." The kids said that Jesse, Arnie's 18 year old son joined in. Eventually there were orgies of sexual abuse. The kids recounted being held down by one attacker and raped by another. Games of naked leapfrog took place. They were videotaped and photographed and threatened to stay silent. The kids said Arnie threatened to burn their houses down and kill their parents. Other kids in the exact same classes said absolutely nothing happened. They just learned how to use a computer. They said. The police kept telling them these horrible things had happened to them, insisting that these horrible things had happened to them. But these kids insisted that nothing like that ever happened. Some of these kids stayed resolute, but others eventually buckled. One mom said her son, and this is a quote from the article "Started out saying nothing happened, then maybe I saw something. Then about 2 hours later, well, maybe Arnold did expose himself. Maybe Jesse did expose himself." Finally, the boy described being fondled and sodomized. At that point I went nuts, the mom said, remembering the fury she felt at Arnold Friedman. I said, if you don't arrest him after what I just heard, I'm going to buy a gun and kill him. Arnie and Jesse and Jesse's friend were arrested and charged with hundreds of counts of sexual abuse, including molestation and sodomy. But they all three maintained their innocence. So who are these Friedmans? We've met Arnold. He was born in Brighton Beach. He went on to play piano for a Latin band in the Catskills under the moniker Arnito Rey and married Elaine Friedman when they were both very young. He admitted he was attracted to boys from a very early age. The problem was that as he grew older, the age of the boys he was attracted to stayed the same. He said he molested his 8 year old brother Howard when he was 13. Howard has no memory of this. Elaine and Arnie had three sons David, Seth and Jesse. Now they are grown, obviously. And when this documentary was made in the 80s, Jesse was the youngest, so he was 18. And the other two brothers were older than he was. David, incidentally, is Silly Billy. Do you know who Silly Billy is? He is the number one clown in New York City for children's party.

[09:56] Jessica: Are you kidding me?

[09:57] Meg: No, I am not. You have to book him years in advance. You cannot get Silly Billy unless you know somebody.

[10:05] Jessica: I'm genuinely at a loss. Just continue.

[10:08] Meg: All right. Seth the middle brother, David. Silly Billy is the oldest. Seth, the middle one, is an endocrinologist currently. And, well, Jesse was in prison until 2001, but now he's out. When they were growing up on Long Island in the 80s, the boys were all very close with their father. He was by far the favorite parent of the two, which is interesting. Right. Arnold played the piano and had a great sense of humor. Charismatic, loved to film home movies. And Elaine, their mother, who the boys all call humorless, was kind of the odd man out. When the shit hit the fan in '87, they kept filming these home movies and Capturing the Friedmans, the documentary. You get to see all kinds of family dysfunction. It's insane. And in the film, all three boys are furious at Elaine, their mom. How did you know?

[11:07] Jessica: You just told me.

[11:09] Meg: Okay. They blame her for everything. Somehow the whole thing is her fault. And she's finding out about what's going on at the same time that they're finding out what's going on. So that's interesting to watch. In the meantime, Arnie admits to being a pedophile, but he says he never acted on it except twice at their lake house.

[11:28] Jessica: I never acted on it, except I did.

[11:30] Meg: Okay, well, at their lake house, but never with the computer students.

[11:34] Jessica: Who was at the lake house?

[11:35] Meg: Other little boys.

[11:37] Jessica: All right.

[11:38] Meg: Okay. In the meantime, the parents in Great Neck have, understandably, gone ballistic and they are sending their traumatized kids to therapy where they are hypnotized to remember what happened to them because some who are saying, nothing happened to me. And then they're hypnotized to recover these memories. Right. And the molestation stories keep growing in intensity. One boy claimed that in a ten.

[12:02] Jessica: Is this under hypnosis?

[12:05] Meg: Yeah.

[12:05] Jessica: Okay.

[12:06] Meg: So one boy claimed that in a ten week class. So that's ten hour and a half classes that have eight to ten kids in the class he had been sodomized 41 times. So that's at least three times per class. And the police are unable to recover any physical evidence. No photos, no film, no blood, no semen, nothing. But the boy's testimonials are enough for the court.

[12:32] Meg: And Arnie and Jesse and Jesse's Friend are looking at lifetime sentences if they are found guilty. Jesse's friend is the first of the three to make a deal. He turns on the other three sorry, he turns on the other two. He gets six months for turning in the other two. Then Arnie pleads guilty, hoping Jesse will get a lighter sentence. Then Jesse pleads guilty to saying every gruesome thing actually happened. He even says Arnie molested him. But he doesn't get a lighter sentence. The judge sentences him to the maximum. 18 years after he is in jail, Jesse recants all of his confessions. He now says his lawyer convinced him to say it was all true so he would be treated better in jail. Jesse's friend recants, too, saying he was pressured to take the deal. Arnie committed suicide in jail and left his life insurance money to Jesse. Elaine remarried and David, Silly Billy changed his name. He's still known as Silly Billy, but he changed his last name. Many of the adult men who claimed abuse have since recanted. Many still insist they were subjected to horrific sexual abuse. So it's very controversial. Do you want me to keep talking?

[13:40] Jessica: Keep talking. Okay. Yeah. That's quite a twist at the end, Meg.

[13:44] Meg: It's a lot, right?

[13:45] Jessica: It's a lot. That's a big question mark now hanging over, though.

[13:49] Meg: It's a huge question mark.

[13:51] Jessica: And and what's the scuttlebutt amongst legal scholars and journalists?

[13:56] Meg: It depends on who you ask.

[13:59] Jessica: So there's no majority viewpoint.

[14:03] Meg: I don't know about majority. Let me do my little note on something that was happening in the 80s all over this country. The Satanic Panic and daycare sex abuse hysteria. So that's what was going on all over the country. Many believed in sweeping, lurid claims of Satanic ritual abuse and sexual abuse of children with little or no evidence beyond the testimonials of the children who were interviewed by adults in very leading and coercive ways.

[14:34] Jessica: So this is all over the country?

[14:36] Meg: All over the country. The McMartin trial was in Southern California, and that's like the super famous one, but it was all over the place. If you look at the dots on the, it's not localized in any way.

[14:49] Jessica: It sounds very witch hunty.

[14:51] Meg: You think? Exactly. When the police were interviewing the kids, they would say, I know he stuck this thing inside of you. Didn't he also make you do this other horrible thing? And eventually the kids I mean, you know about false confessions, right? I mean, the way that these police.

[15:07] Jessica: It'S easier to get them to stop by just saying, yes.

[15:09] Meg: I just want to go home. Okay. What do you want me to say? You want me to say this happened?

[15:13] Meg: Fine. It happened. And the Friedman case is particularly problematic because Arnold was a pedophile. So did something happen? Probably something happened, but I don't necessarily think naked leapfrog happened. Right. Because it just seems impossible, that naked leapfrog.

[15:36] Jessica: Well, why does it seem impossible to.

[15:38] Meg: There wasn't enough space in the room to begin with.

[15:41] Jessica: I have a question. Did the parents ever note before anything came out, were the parents noting any change in their kids behavior?

[15:49] Meg: No.

[15:50] Jessica: So the kids were totally business as usal.

[15:53] Meg: Until the magazine was discovered.

[15:56] Jessica: Is there any data on how frequently kids who have been interfered with do display some kind of disturbance prior to the whole thing coming out?

[16:09] Meg: See, that I cannot tell you. I do not know that. What I was going to say, though, is that these were hour and a half classes with a bunch of kids, and the allegations that are being made are actually impossible. Now, that doesn't mean that something didn't happen. It just means that what they were ultimately accused of could not have happened.

[16:26] Jessica: And how many kids were in a class?

[16:28] Meg: Eight to ten.

[16:29] Jessica: What I'm about to say has nothing to do with reality, because I don't know what happened.

[16:36] Meg: Neither do I.

[16:37] Jessica: And this is not casting aspersions on the kids or anyone who has ever suffered this way, of course, but I remember being 11, 10 and in a room with seven to nine other kids. There would have been a lot of screaming and carrying on and running out of there. No matter how many threats there were. Kids are unruly.

[17:01] Meg: It's hard to imagine the allegations that they made, happening. You mentioned Salem Witch Trials. I read something really interesting that said, "Hysteria tells true stories falsely."

[17:17] Jessica: Oh, interesting, right. Great quote.

[17:20] Meg: I think so, too. So if you think about it, were kids being protected from sexual predators in the 80s, in the 70s and 80s? Not as much as they should have been, but a lot of the abuse was happening in private.

[17:37] Jessica: Well, I would imagine that most sexual abuse of children happens in private.

[17:41] Meg: Right, but what we're talking about is public. It's very, a whole group of people. It's orgies, it's ritual. There are a group of people in one room. But if you are just beginning to find out, imagine your parents of children and you're starting to find out about pedophilia that you didn't even necessarily knew that much about and you don't know how to process it. Are you going to be worried about how your child is actually being threatened, being groomed? Or are you going to think, oh, these are monsters, and monsters behave in this extreme way?

[18:17] Jessica: Well, yes. I mean, your point easier to believe in the well, it's also your point about how there wasn't an open discussion in the country about child molestation the way that it is even 15 years ago, much less now. So I could imagine that any parent would go from 0 to 60 in a nanosecond.

[18:38] Meg: Absolutely.

[18:39] Jessica: And without even having any tools with which to question, wait a minute, this seems weird, but you know, also, as a non parent, I have to say I am woefully unqualified to say, like what I would do in these circumstances.

[18:53] Meg: The I mean, as a parent, I would go completely ballistic.

[18:57] Jessica: Absolutely.

[18:58] Meg: There's no question. There's no one to blame here, except perhaps Arnold Friedman, who was in fact a pedophile and who I imagine did something. We know he admitted to doing something at the lake house at least, but did he play naked leapfrog? I'm thinking no. I'm thinking things got and this is just my opinion, things got super blown out, mostly because the people in authority didn't know how to talk to the kids about it and they didn't know how to process what they were dealing with. Hysteria does pop up in history. You mentioned the Salem Witch Trials. We've got the Satanic Panic. I mean, we've got QAnon happening right now.

[19:42] Jessica: Yes. I think that the other thing that really sticks with me is that Jesse testified that his dad raped him.

[19:49] Meg: He now says, never happened.

[19:51] Jessica: But I mean, just think about this for a second. Like your favorite parent. Let's pretend that nothing happened just for a second. Your favorite parent. You are separated because you're being held for Rikers Island, for whatever the charges were at the time. So they're separated, and someone says, just rat out your dad. That's a big leap.

[20:14] Meg: I'll just say, if you watch the documentary, Andrew Jurecki thinks nothing happened.

[20:18] Jessica: Really?

[20:19] Meg: Yeah.

[20:20] Jessica: Interesting.

[20:20] Meg: I mean, he doesn't say absolutely nothing happened, but you get the feeling that definitely Jesse, no question about it got set up.

[20:28] Jessica: Interesting. Wow.

[20:29] Meg: By the court system. I mean, basically they were like, do you want to go to jail for the rest of your life? Or just say your dad did bad things to you and people feel sorry for you? And your dad is saying, just say something so that you don't have to go away forever.

[20:43] Jessica: Oh, he did say that.

[20:44] Meg: The dad did. Yeah. There's a lot of, like just save Jesse.

[20:48] Jessica: This is so grim.

[20:49] Meg: I know it's grim, and it's complicated.

[20:52] Jessica: Okay, here's how I'm going to reframe this for my own sanity. For me, this is less a conversation about molestation than it is about hysteria and the perils of the hive mind.

[21:08] Meg: For me, judges and police people and how easy it is for everybody. And once people get their head set on something, you can't even talk about the truth.

[21:18] Jessica: Funny enough, we have sort of I mean, it's not a child problem, but we have a current event that sort of looks at this, which is the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial right now or not trial, but the court case, he brought charges against her for libel and slander. I think that's what it is. So it's a civil case. It's not criminal. But when she first made the allegations and he what were her allegations? That he he tortured and abused her and he lost all of his work with the Disney franchises. He was completely I mean, talk about canceled. Done. Done. And now that he's been on the stand testifying on his own behalf and his friends and girls, old girlfriends and his wife and former wife and all of this, now the group hysteria is that he's innocent and Amber Heard is a monster.

[22:18] Meg: So it's one extreme or the other.

[22:20] Jessica: Exactly. And what's the better story in the moment?

[22:24] Meg: Right. And the truth is probably something harder to talk about.

[22:29] Jessica: I was just going to say something that sounded like it was from The X-Files. The truth is always somewhere in the middle, between the extremes that society wants to or is that like a little Shatner-y? It's another story that chips away at faith in humanity.

[22:46] Meg: Well, thank you for I know you hate these kinds of stories.

[22:50] Jessica: But didn't we have an agreement that there was more child stuff, or was that just me having a fit after the last I think it might have been me having a fit. Yeah.

[22:59] Meg: I'm sorry. I do true crime. That's what I do.

[23:03] Jessica: No, but it'll be okay. Well, it will. It happened a long time ago, and people are now much more savvy, and there are nanny cams, which there weren't.

[23:15] Meg: And I do think that it's important to talk about things that happen.

[23:19] Jessica: You know what, Meg? You're absolutely right. That is the ultimate way to shut down my squeamishness.

[23:27] Meg: I will absolutely take your feelings into account.

[23:29] Jessica: No, but I'm still going to tell you. I'm sure I'm a very small demographic. Air the filth.

[23:37] Meg: Wait until next week.

[23:38] Jessica: No, that's not funny. And we're back. Do we want to have any follow up on what we just experienced? Are we ready to go forward into the land of less intense?

[23:56] Meg: Let's move forward. Okay.

[23:56] Jessica: All right. So. Oh, my God. Meg, what happens when you like live in the San Fernando Valley?

[24:05] Meg: You start talking like that.

[24:08] Jessica: What is what do you call that? Valley girl. Yeah. Gag me with a spoon. So today we're going to talk about Valley girls. Valley girls. Oh, my God. What do Valley girls have to do with New York City, you ask?

[24:29] Meg: Well, the movie.

[24:31] Jessica: No. Okay, well, let's pull back for a moment.

[24:35] Meg: Sure.

[24:36] Jessica: Interestingly. We talked about The Official Preppy Handbook and the the wave of prep that swept the nation in 1980. Well, 1982 was the year of the Valley girl. That's also the year that we met, although neither one of us said, you're so grody. But 1982 was the year of the Valley girl. It was the year that the movie Valley Girl came out. The first and last time I ever thought that Nicholas Cage was somewhat cute, very talented actor. But it was the year that Fast Times at Ridgemont High was in production, and Fast Times was released in 1983. And Cameron Crowe's book, which, by the way, is really hard to find and it is incredibly good and really worth reading, he went undercover as a high school student. That was published in 1981. Okay. So it was straddling the year. And in 1982, the handbook The Valley Girls' Guide to Life was published as well as, Fer Shur! How to Be a Valley Girl. - Totally! And the song that really started it all, Moon Unit, Fer sure, She's a Valley Girl. So that was 1982, right? Actually, Moon Unit sang it, but it was Frank Zappa's song.

[26:03] Meg: Yeah. I mean, when I said what was it had to do with New York, I would never have known that it even existed except for the movie and the song. That's how it got to New York.

[26:14] Jessica: Well, I wound up having some incredibly good luck. I don't really go on Facebook that much anymore, but I'll admit there are a couple of people who I'm friends with on Facebook who I'm friends with because I've always loved their work and I'm a bit of a fangirl. And one of these people is Mimi Pond, who is a very, very well known cartoonist and writer and generally brilliant, amazing woman. And she's now in LA. And she's married to the equally talented artist Wayne White and so there I was looking up these books, and I looked up The Valley Girls' Guide to Life, and lo and behold, Mimi wrote it.

[26:57] Meg: Oh, my goodness.

[26:57] Jessica: And I was like, okay, what's the story here? So very graciously, Mimi got on the phone with me and explained the New York City Valley girl connection.

[27:10] Meg: Okay. Oh, I'm very excited.

[27:12] Jessica: In 1982, when Mini was 25 years old, she came to New York to establish herself as a cartoonist.

[27:22] Meg: Okay.

[27:23] Jessica: And she got a bunch of jobs illustrating and cartooning for The Village Voice. And she was living and this dovetails with a lot of the other stuff that we've talked about. She was living in the East Village in a total dump. I think she said it was on 5th Street and Avenue B. Wuff. Yes. Indeed.

[27:49] Meg: That's scary.

[27:50] Jessica: There was nothing cute about it, but she was making a name for herself and doing very well and living. She told me that living in the East Village really was very much like what we described and that it was all of the artists living there because you could basically live in, next to a squat dump for five cents, and that there was a really great, thriving artist community. I asked her if she ever went clubbing, and she was like, no, but there were lots of artists who would congregate at bars and hang out. So that was her scene. They were much cooler, and they were a downtown, and that was that. And just as a side note, Mimi, among her many accomplishments, Mimi wrote the very first full length episode of The Simpsons.

[28:38] Meg: Oh, wow.

[28:39] Jessica: And her husband was the set designer and puppeteer for Peewee's Playhouse. So these are very interesting people. So there was young Mimi. She got a phone call sort of out of nowhere from an editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, I think at the time, in 1982, it was still just Dell Books. And this editor, whose name was Gary Luke, said, you're funny, you're interesting, you're smart. What do you got? And she didn't really have anything that was a book in her at the time, no problem. He kept his eye on her. So I guess maybe she got to New York. And like, maybe this is more like she got there in 80, 81. Soon after, she gets another phone call from Gary Luke. Come in. I think I have something for you.

[29:28] Meg: And he likes her because of her cartoons, right.

[29:31] Jessica: And she's funny. She's very witty. She does the writing along with the cartoons. She's the whole package. And the Frank Zappa song had just come out. So this editor at one of the biggest publishing houses in New York City says, let's do a book quick so we can capitalize on this, because this is going to be a big craze.

[29:50] Meg: And where did she grow up?

[29:52] Jessica: Good question. She grew up in San Diego. Okay. But she had no knowledge of these girls, all right? She was completely not even remotely associated with that type of girl, much less Los Angeles and the Valley. So she had no idea. So he said, you do this. This will be a really good project. She's like, okay, I know nothing about this. What do I do? So she gets on a plane and she goes to LA. And she's checking it out, and she said, and I love this because this is such a writerly thing to do. She just stalked these girls all over the mall, and she listened to them talking to each other on escalators, and she looked at the clothing, and she just studied them like sociology projects. She really got a handle on them. Margaret Mead. She was so she does the book. She writes it for Gary Luke. Guess what? New York Times bestseller now. Interesting.

[30:52] Meg: Yes.

[30:53] Jessica: The Official Preppy Handbook. I understand how that got to be so popular in New York, but New York Times national bestseller? What's that about? So keep that earmarked for yourself. So now this is this book is is incredibly well known, and they really want to publicize it. So 25 year old Mimi is put in limousines and carted around the country talking on radio shows, radio programs about the book. But one of the things I love about Mimi is she has a slightly cranky, misanthropic little twinge to her. So the idea of her having to associate with all of those DJs and all of just the masses would have been probably horrible for her. By the way, I failed to mention one of the other big Valley Girl things of the 80s. In 1982, our good friend Sarah Jessica Parker, wife of Matthew Broderick of the Matthew Broderick garbage bag plan aforementioned. Thank you Regina George. She was in the children's chorus at the Metropolitan Opera along with our friend of the podcast Nick, and he remembers that she left the chorus saying, I got a show.

[32:08] Meg: Square Pegs.

[32:09] Jessica: Yes, Square Pegs. Square Pegs, which you can't

[32:15] Meg: Find it? I've tried to find it, and I can't find it.

[32:17] Jessica: I found it a while ago. But for those who don't know what it is, Square Pegs took place in Los Angeles. And it was basically like Freaks and Geeks. I was going to, but the earlier version, and there was a new wave kid called, like, Johnny Cool or something insane. There was Muffy Tepperman, played by Jami Gertz, who was the perfect girl, and Sarah Jessica Parker and I forgot the other one's name. They were the nerds. Lauren was the name of the other character. And there was like a Greaser type. And my favorite what's her name? Tracy Nelson played. She was Jennifer. Yes, Jennifer, I think. DeNuccio, who was how do you remember that? Who was a Valley Girl? Exactly. This is my curse, but it's unlike.

[33:06] Meg: Freaks and Geeks, which was retro.

[33:10] Jessica: This was absolutely at the time. So that was another that's 1982. And if you can find it, I really recommend I'm going to look for it, that you watch it, because I.

[33:20] Meg: Remember it was amazing.

[33:22] Jessica: It's a perfect time capsule, and it was a really smart show. I think it falls into that category of brilliant, but canceled.

[33:29] Meg: I think I only had, like one two seasons, maybe.

[33:31] Jessica: Okay. I don't know, one or two. So there's Mimi, and she is now a New Yorker sent out into the wild by a New York editor. And this book is a gigantic hit. I was like, Mimi, what I don't understand here is I know that in New York and on the East Coast, we were sort of delighted by how self referential The Official Preppy Handbook was. And I can't really understand why it took off across the country. So why do you think Valley Girl stuff became so ubiquitous that now the pattern of up speed, the hallmark of Valley Girl, the Valley Girl accent oh, my God. Everyone goes, oh, my God.

[34:16] Meg: I was walking across the street.

[34:19] Jessica: How did this catch on? Why did this catch on? And she said something that absolutely blew my mind. She said it was the first pop culture creation that was entirely about teenage girls, and it created a community and a shared point of reference for girls around the country. And so it wasn't even so much that they were buying into whatever the Valley Girl mindset or whatever was, but the trappings of it and the clothing and the speech patterns and the music and all of that was so cotton candy that it was pretty innocuous. It wasn't threatening in any way. It was a way to have fun as a girl that was being reflected to you from pop culture, and then you were reflecting it back.

[35:12] Meg: I remember.

[35:12] Jessica: That is genius.

[35:13] Meg: It's very interesting. And I remember as a New Yorker, it was all very alien to me. I didn't know how malls worked.

[35:23] Jessica: Okay, so as I said, she was talking them in the mall. The mall, for those of you who don't know, was the epicenter of Valley Girl life. And if you see the movie or really read any of these books that I've mentioned, they don't even exist without the mall. And the mall was the gathering center for all kids, watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High. They all have their jobs in the mall. But you're right, I had never been to a mall either. I had no idea. How old were you when you first went to a mall?

[35:57] Meg: I went to a mall well, when I was growing up, but it was when I visited my grandparents in Atlanta, Georgia. Because there's definitely a mall culture in Atlanta, Georgia, but there's no equivalent in New York.

[36:08] Jessica: No, there is a department store, but.

[36:10] Meg: No one hangs out at the department.

[36:12] Jessica: No, I'm saying, like, the largest store. It's just a store.

[36:16] Meg: So where did we hang out? What's our equivalent of the mall?

[36:19] Jessica: Coffee shops.

[36:20] Meg: Yeah, I mean, there were places that we hung out, but not that kind.

[36:23] Jessica: It wasn't like there was an alternate village reality for teenagers. Right.

[36:29] Meg: We were amongst the adults.

[36:31] Jessica: Yeah, we were wherever the people were. What was your impression of the mall when you first saw it?

[36:38] Meg: I kind of thought it was cool because there are, like, places you could go play video games and you could buy things. I mean, I loved it. And I hung out with my friend Pam Riddlemyer, Pam, who grew up in Atlanta, and she was sort of my best friend when I went to go visit my grandparents. And she would give me a tour of mall life in Atlanta. And I thought it was really cool.

[37:00] Jessica: Well, I remember I couldn't have been more than 13. So this is somewhere between 1981 and 1983. I had a really lovely friend from camp, and here's a spoiler. I'm going to do a whole thing on camp, so just let's just put a pin in that. But I had a great friend from summer camp, and she and I were the only girls not from Long Island or New Jersey, and so we were absolutely ostracized. And I'm going to tell a very quick story about my second summer camp. So my parents bless them, kept sending me to these, like, regular camps, like there are sports. I was really not cut out for that. So I arrived at this new camp, I think I was ten. And so this is 1980, and I'm wearing Lee jeans with a boot cut with my Frye boots and my plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbow and my long hair parted in the middle. And I walked into Jordache land and sparkly barrettes and that whole thing. And I had always been taught by my parents, my mother specifically, who is a bit formal. When you meet someone, you go up to them, you shake their hand, you look at them in the eye and you say, hello, my name is Jessica. What's your name? So I do this and she says, oh, my God, are you English? Hey, everybody, meet English. It was like everyone in the bunk was Jimmy Cagney. Hey, everybody, come on. So I was English. That was my name for the summer. But Laurie from Connecticut was like, I'm with you, English. Let's avoid the giant comb in the back pocket, kids, as much as we possibly can. They took so much joy in winging our hair for ice cream, socials with Camp Greylock, the boys across the lake. It's all real. It is. Absolutely. Little Darlings was real. Anyway, so Laurie, who was awesome, had me stay over at her place, her parents house in Connecticut, many times. And the very first time she took me to the mall, it was like, going to The Lost City of Z. I was like, what is this exotic land? I'd never seen anything.

[39:44] Meg: There's a store for socks.

[39:45] Jessica: It was cavernous. It was cavernous. And there were water features, and there was so much junk food, I couldn't even fathom, like, what's, an Orange Julius? I couldn't get it. So I thought it was the most magical thing in the entire. Agreed. I would come home from my jaunts to Stamford, Connecticut, bitterly complaining that I didn't get to live in the suburbs. And my parents were like, she'll get over it in 30 seconds. All right. 30, 29, 28 so that's really our introduction to Valley. And what I also think is kind of interesting we mentioned this before during the Broadway episode. That at our school, talking like a Valley Girl was not really cool. And instead we had this craze where we were all talking like Jackie Mason. Yet again, proof that New York is not the world. New York is a very, very weird place.

[40:53] Meg: But made this decision I mean, a publishing decision.

[40:57] Jessica: That's right.

[40:58] Meg: To make it universal.

[40:59] Jessica: So the birth of the still to this day lasting Valley trend. In fact, do you know what's a Valley trend?

[41:08] Meg: What?

[41:09] Jessica: You'll find it in every text thread that you've done in the last couple of days. Oh My God. OMG. There you go. That's the birth of that. So that's Valley Girls, and thank you so much for listening, that was amazing. I don't know if it was, like, amazing, but it wasn't. So we've come to the conclusion of yet another episode, and I've noticed that in the last couple of episodes, what we talk about has a crossover. Like, there's some connection between the two topics.

[41:44] Meg: What is the crossover this time?

[41:46] Jessica: I'm wondering.

[41:47] Meg: I don't know if there is.

[41:48] Jessica: The only thing I can think of is that oh, my God, those girls from camp were from Long Island. Okay, I'll take it. All right, Stacey. Good night. Thanks, Meg. Thank you, Jessica.