FADS WE LOVED TO HATE

All Together Now:

Say goodby to the ‘80s. They’re outta here! Sayonara. Farewell. Auf wiedersehn. Later.

It was a decade that brought a few good things. For instance . . . Well, there was . . . Umm . . . Hmmm, give us 10 years and maybe we’ll come up with something.

Given the weather, the ocean, the generous number of plastic surgeons, psychics, psychologists and assorted others who can help you feel good and look wonderful, Orange County has carved its own little niche as incubator or booster of fads, trends, happenings and blots on humanity.

It may not have started here, but we probably “elevated it to a new level,” as they say in television sports. Or at least we embraced it. Maybe we even helped kill it.

You may have your own pet peeves. These are ours, culled from The Times Orange County staff, written and compiled by staff writers John Needham and Nancy Wride. If you disagree, drop us a line. But for now, here are the fads we loved to hate.

Do you have that silk Giorgio Armani jacket in a 52 short?

Remember Crockett and Tubbs of “Miami Vice”? Oh sure, they looked fine for a while. All those nice pastels blended so nicely with the palm trees, sort of like Corona del Mar with an MTV soundtrack. Ferraris breaking the sound barrier, sort of like Coast Highway in Newport Beach. Huge amounts of drugs seized in police raids, sort of like a lot of places in Orange County. But be serious now; do you really miss the local version: 50-year-old men with 50-inch waists wearing Easter-egg-colored, unlined linen jackets, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, a sky blue T-shirt, loafers without socks, French-cut underwear, moussed hair (or what’s left of it), squeezing behind the wheel of their Testerossas? Wearing their Ray-Bans inside a seaside bar where they wrapped their lips around a bottle of Corona? And for heaven’s sakes, don’t forget the lime wedge.

And after all that, they still prefer Quarter-Pounders.

McDonald’s branched out from hamburgers (over 30 zillion served) to chicken, ribs, eggs, muffins, and order-takers whose silly grins came straight from those insipid smiley-face buttons (see Fads of the ‘70s We Loved to Hate). Elsewhere, the foodies were consuming blue corn tortillas. True. Blue. The color of sky, mouthwash and frostbite. The salad wars featured radicchio battling arugula for the “must” ingredient of the decade. Spaghetti became pasta and immediately went up $5 a plate. Nouvelle cuisine threatened to make anorexia commonplace. Silver lining: You could burn the steak or fish beyond recognition over the back-yard barbie (using mesquite coals, of course) but rescue it by slathering on large amounts of hot sauce and spices and passing it off as “Cajun.”

Does anyone really care who’s in the trunk?

The original rationale of “Baby on Board” signs was that when the paramedics arrived at the crash scene with jaws of life at the ready and draped the sheet over your body, they wouldn’t say, “Hey, what a night. Let’s head for Winchell’s.” No, the sign would spur them to look through the iron-and-steel pancake for the infant needing help. This assumed that the sign, unlike you, survived the crash. And was somewhere where it could be read. And was removed from the car each and every time a baby was not on board. The one silver lining of the signs was an offshoot it spawned: “Mother-in-law in trunk.” That one was funny--the first time you saw it.

Body by Nautilus, brain by Mattel.

In the old days there were gyms. They were smelly and so were the people who used them. You wore a leotard only if you knew a plie from a jete. If you rode a bike, it meant you couldn’t afford a car. Or you had picked up one too many DUIs. Now the gym is a health club. The leotards make fashion statements and you wear them to the supermarket. The bike costs $2,000--and get this, it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s an exercise bike. You get on it and pedal your little heart out. You’re exhausted. You push the button and the bike’s built-in computer, the reason it costs $2,000, flashes the message, “You’re exhausted.” And all this has spawned exercise accessories like ankle warmers, wristlets and coordinated headbands. The men are wearing Spandex bicycle shorts. They shouldn’t. After paying hundreds of dollars to join a club and $50 or more a month to stay a member, you can develop more than your muscles. You can develop a “relationship.” Two hard bodies meeting in the Stairmaster line. A fitting successor to discos.

Because I’m counting on you to finance my retirement at age 50, that’s why.

If you’re just looking for a glorified baby sitter, try day care. But as more parents started pushing for their kids to actually learn something in the process, they picked nursery schools. The result: nursery schools with waiting lists. Proving you can’t start learning adult behavior too early. Tots’ togs bore designer labels. The simplest gifts for teens carried price tags of $100 and up. Even sneakers. By the time their bones creaked and their hands shook and they were all of 17, it was time to order up that gleaming, long, white, stretch limo to go to the prom in style. Not to worry about higher education, though: Saturday study classes became popular (with parents, anyway). And were accompanied by consultants on how to get to college. “Study, study, study.”

Reach out and crush someone.

It was the biggest corporation in America. Its stock was a widow’s delight, conservative, good on dividends, no worries. Just say AT&T.; Above all, the company worked. It actually worked. They broke it up. Of course. Now you buy your own phone, plug it into the phone jack and pray nothing goes wrong. Need the jack repaired? Good, show us your $100 bill. Get a wrong number? Tough. Then there were the offshoots: car phones, portable phones, phones that would redial the last number you had dialed, that would forward your calls to another phone, that would let you put someone on hold and take a new call coming in to see if the second call was from someone more important. That was fun. Until it happened to you. “Gotta’ run now, this call is important.”

If the ‘60s are over, why do you still have the munchies?

Overnight, grocery stores began staying open all night. True, only one check-out line was open. True, it wasn’t pillars of the community who were shopping at 3 a.m. True, it was hard to navigate up and down aisles overflowing with cat food cans waiting to be restocked on the shelves. Still, if you suddenly found yourself out of brie, help was at hand. If you absolutely couldn’t last another moment without a taste of caviar, you had somewhere to go. If, heaven forbid, you had only red wine in the house and had decided on a 4 a.m. fish fry, you knew what you could do. Silver lining: You could always get a shopping cart. Gold lining: You could always get a parking space. Platinum lining: They’d take just about any coupon you gave them.

I’ll take ‘Homicide-Inducing Games’ for 10, Art.

Leave it to a guy named Erno to think up a game like Rubik’s Cube. See, this Hungarian architecture professor creates this block of colored boxes, and you twist it all around for a couple of bloody days trying to get each of the, er, let’s see, six sides, one solid color. Yeah, man. This is kind of interesting. Ha! While the rest of your friends are breaking open the wine at dinner, you’re still going to town on this $%X!! square of plastic. The decaf cappuccinos are brewing and you’ve got your feet involved in this battle now. Some pretty good times here, huh? A game that makes you feel . . . dumber than a rock (no offense to rocks). Of course, good ole Erno Rubik made a fortune off this thing before we got the Socially Correct Party Game. That’s right, Trivial Pursuit, perfect for the ‘80s, when we hated to fritter away time that we could be better off spending acquiring knowledge, money, power or all of the above. And Trivial Pursuit shared something in common with “Rocky”: It developed sequels.

The next sound you hear will be your arteries clanging shut.

All of a sudden everyone knew his cholesterol count: 150 (vegetarian); 200 (lookin’ mighty fine, guy); 250 (your wife looks good in black anyway). Then came a book saying, “Wait a minute, maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe it’s low cholesterol that hurts.” They’re not the only ones who have changed. Plastic surgeons made faces tight, breasts large, stomachs flat. Dentists, needing to come up with college tuition for their kids, invented new ways to separate people from their money too. Tooth bonding. Porcelain veneering. Plastic, nearly invisible braces. They discovered gum problems in middle-age men who were trying to get their own kids through college. The lawyers paid off the dentists by billing us $450 an hour. We told the kids to win scholarships.

Cross-dressing ex-cons and the biker gang members who love them. Or vice versa.

He opened a safe. It was empty. He stuck his nose in other people’s business. It got broken. But did he take the hint? Did he leave? Uh-uh. Oh, Geraldo. He had company. Oprah lost weight. Phil grew a beard. Sally had three names. Whatever. The forces of daytime TV talk shows turned over rocks in every burg in America, looking for people who hated their friends, loved their enemies and took their clothes off when they shudn’t oughta’ done that. For those wanting more in-depth reportage, though, there were People and Us magazines. Not to be confused with Interview and Vanity Fair. The decade of gossip even had a theme song: “Dirty Laundry.”

How do you tell a drunken sailor?

It used to be seamen on shore leave who got tattoos. Every once in a while there’d be a mass murderer with Mom or Love burned onto his biceps in indelible ink. But then came the disclosure that Secretary of State George Shultz has a Princeton tiger tattooed on a part of his body seen only by his wife and the guys in the locker room. Mark Gastineau and Brigitte Nielsen got tattooed for each other. We didn’t see theirs, either. And finally Cher turned her back on us, wore an incredible outfit--even by her standards--and showed us her tattoo. On anyone else, we wouldn’t have seen it, but you know that Cher.

He’s tanned. He’s rested. He’s ready.

Yorba Linda, birthplace of Richard M. Nixon, won the battle to be the site of the Nixon library. Fittingly in a land where “surf’s up” outweighs “back to school” as a battle cry, it will be a library without books. Well, at least not the sort of books you’re used to seeing in a presidential library. Documents and tapes from the Nixon presidency, normally de rigeur for this sort of archive, have been confiscated by the federal government, thanks to Watergate (see “Fads of the ‘70s We Loved to Hate”). Other materials from the days before he became president were turned over to the government in 1968 to get a tax break (see “Fads of the ‘60s We Loved to Hate”). Still more historical artifacts are part of the Cal State Fullerton Oral History Program. Yorba Linda doesn’t mind, though. After all, the house where Nixon was born is featured on the city seal.

Baby, you can drive my car.

Used to be you got your car valet-parked when you were going someplace really special--like the Academy Awards or at least a ritzy restaurant that was probably French. That was OK because, hey, the place was French and the dinner was costing you so much you didn’t care about a measly buck for the valet tip. Now it seems that people park your car everywhere, and it’s not a gratuity but a service charge. At some joints, they force you to let them park it--for a $2 fee. Almost makes you feel held up before dinner, doesn’t it? The fact that the radio station is always on some other channel than yours nags at you, leading to suspicions that your car went drag-racing without you.

It still beats platform shoes.

Women started the decade looking like women. They ended it looking like football linebackers. “Dress for Success” meant blue suits, standard-issue white blouses and big, loud paisley “power” bows. Then came shoulder pads, creating a profile only a football coach could appreciate. Top it all off with a pair of Reeboks. Scout South Coast Plaza at noon or 6 p.m. someday to see the total effect. “She’s really strong through the shoulders, Brent, and she’s got her game face on.”

Muffy meets Lands’ End.

Holy Moley, was this the decade of the duck. Those little quackers stepped out of your kid’s nursery and onto your tie. Maybe yuppies really are just preppies with better clothes. Starting with the Reagan White House and finishing with the Bush administration, we returned to tradition. Nancy introduced us to the Chanel look, Barbara brought us pearls. And designers such as Ralph Lauren have made stuff fashionable that you would have refused to wear in high school. We are talking about the golfer thing. Plaid pants, corduroy blazers, shoes with tassels, for Pete’s sake! And suddenly you found yourself succumbing, even as you panicked that you were becoming your father. Your coffee table just wouldn’t do without a catalogue from Lands’ End, L.L. Beene or Eddie Bauer. Jumpers became acceptable for women over age 12. Sales of penny loafers soared. Khaki pants, Topsiders, polo shirts--collars up, of course--became the rage. Silver lining: You could get away with sensible shoes at a party.

Eau de Rich and Famous.

Okay, so you can’t look like your favorite celebrity. You can still smell like them! We’ve seen some big personalities get behind their favorite toilette water these past 10 years, the latest of which is trumpeter Herb Alpert. (Can anybody even remember the name of his last album?) Making Alpert’s perfume, called Listen, taught him a lot: “When I started dealing with the perfumers, they talked my language: high end, low end, top note, opening note, mid-range, bass and treble.” Oh puh-lease! The debut of Sophia Loren’s perfume in 1980 launched the celebrity fragrance derby. Then came “Forever Krystle,” named after Linda Evans’ character in the TV series, “Dynasty,” followed by Carrington, good ole Blake’s gift to his wife. Julio (“Of All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”) Iglesias has his own perfume now (he evidently did lots of field work to hit the right brew). Smokey Robinson allegedly is working on a fragrance, as are Joan Collins, Priscilla Presley and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Jaclyn Smith introduced California, Catherine Deneuve had a self-named fragrance and Cher made a splash last year with Uninhibited. But the blockbuster celebrity perfume continues to be Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, which customers like because they view the violet-eyed actress as a survivor. The fragrance industry spends a fortune exploring how the brain responds to smell, but no magic answer has been found. Which probably explains why the World Wrestling Federation is developing a fragrance for its fans that has been dubbed, Eau de Sweat.

This looks like Grandma’s house.

No rock garden here, but almost. Flamingos on the lawn, meat loaf in the oven. Lava lamps in the living room. Retro--that return to the 1950s--cheapened houses at the same time that their value skyrocketed. Now it was possible to live in a $400,000 home that looked like a trailer. You could go out to eat at diners with black-and-white check floors and Dean Martin crooning on the jukebox. Silver lining: Detroit brought back convertibles, so you could drive to the diner in style.

Read our lips: Money talks, everyone else walks.

They call it life in the fast lane. Twice in the decade, the leaders of Orange County asked voters to approve a sales-tax increase to pay for better roads, or new roads, or space shuttles, or UFOs, or something to do with transportation. Twice the idea lost. Now the plan is for toll roads. It’s a concept borrowed from New York--home of Leona Helmsley, Donald Trump and George Steinbrenner. Although you thought your taxes went to build and repair roads, if you want to go faster than 5 m.p.h., you have to pay again, shelling out a toll for a highway with less traffic. It’s a perfect Orange County concept: The rich go faster.