The watershed legwarmer moment came as Kevin and I were coming out of the movie theater, three quarters of the way through a John Hughes film festival. It was 1:30 in the afternoon, we’d just weathered back-to-back showings of Weird Science and Sixteen Candles, and I was thinking it was time to throw in the towel.
“I feel empty,” Kevin said.
“You ate a whole thing of Toffifay in there.”
“It’s not that. I’m having a hormonal flashback to my sexual attraction to Anthony Michael Hall. I feel totally destabilized.”
I held the door for Kevin, and as he shuffled out onto the sidewalk I saw a pair of legwarmers emerge from behind a cardboard Breakfast Club stand-up. They were made of some nappy olive material, and they were swishing across the foyer carpeting, clutching the calves of a woman who looked like she was from somewhere in Eastern Europe. I rushed ahead to catch up with her. I’d been seeing legwarmers with increasing frequency over the past year or so. At first I was horrified by the unwelcome return of these garments I last saw drooping sloppily from the knees of the girls in my upstate New York public middle school, but by degrees I’d come to see them as, well, not necessarily attractive, but endearing at any rate, and I realized, coming out of the theater, that soon they will become attractive to me—that they will metastasize in my consciousness until they attain the same sort of tyrannical ubiquity that bell bottom pants have enjoyed for the past ten years.
“Excuse me,” I said to the woman. “I’m writing a thing about the Eighties and I just want to ask how long you’ve had those.”
The woman looked back sharply at Kevin. He stood at a distance, arms crossed, brow furrowed in front of the Gap, wearing a black Members Only jacket and black Reeboks.
“I seriously just want to know what’s going on with the legwarmers.” I remember clearly that I said “the legwarmers” instead of simply “legwarmers.” What an asshole.
The woman carried a take-out coffee, the kind with the corrugated cardboard jacket, and the multitude of flexible plastic bracelets she wore on her wrist gently thrummed the cup.
“Why are you wearing them?” I persisted.
“I wear them because I like them?”
“Yes but do you—that is, did you choose those on your own, or—?“
“Yes, I like them. They are warm.”
She walked on ahead, faster than I could follow, and disappeared into a smudged crowd of tourists congregated at a bus stop. I ducked into a loud, vintage accessories boutique and feigned interest in a display case...
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