This is the first installment of a three-part series that will be rolled out during this summer and fall where I look back on my life (and society at the time) 10, 20, and 30 years ago. What was going on with me and the world back in 1996? Read on and pass me some Werthers…

I can hear this image. And what else defined 1996?

OK, a lot more happened that year than just a viral song and dance, but this retrospective will be based not on all the major events that happened in ’96, but on the year in the life of yours truly. You may be wondering how I still remember some things from 30 years ago, in spite of all the things I’ve gone through since then that may or may not have affected my ability to remember old stuff. Simply put: I just do. Not saying I remember 1996 like it happened yesterday, but some memories still stand out for me.

Also, clothes from that year were so damn fun.

*A Young Artist* 

I was eleven years old during most of ’96 and started off the year in sixth grade. I started off the year the same way I started off 1995: a chubby, awkward introvert who liked to draw, read, and write. Except one new thing popped into my life in late ’95 that threw me into a tizzy. I’ll give you a hint of what that was: I’ll likely be done with it in 8-10 years. (And I just realized I’m closer to finishing it than I am from when it started. 😱)

Because I was a chubby, awkward, introverted kid, I was a target for bullies, although it eased up when I entered sixth grade. I don’t know why, but I was grateful to not deal with those asswipes as much as before. (Sadly, they’d be back on my ass in the 7th and 8th grade.) And because I was a chubby, awkward, introverted kid, I thought I’d be a loner in school that year. By the end of the 6th grade, however, I actually made some good friends, and they weren’t make-believe for a change. 😆 I also finished the 6th grade as a young artist of sorts. A drawing of mine that I had done in class would be featured in a local art exhibit. And one of my prose pieces would get published in my local newspaper. (That prose became my very first work to be published.) Sadly, that drawing is long gone, and I had hoped my published prose would be found in the newspaper’s archives online, but that newspaper doesn’t even have an online archive to begin with. 😖

*The Look*

(From left to right: an image from the Delia’s catalog that shows the kind of clothes I wore this year, an image on colorful teen fashion from Seventeen magazine, and an ad for Revlon–one of the brands us pre-teens and teens wore. All from 1996.)

I started reading Seventeen magazine this year; coincidentally, I began to dress up. (No pics of young me here, but my fashion sense from ’95 vs. ’96 is like night and day. I went from frumpy to less frumpy!) One look that was “in” was the baby tee and wide-legged pants. I couldn’t roll in baby tees then (they were practically crop tops and I didn’t have the body for crop tops), so I settled for (as what I called them) “semi-baby tees” that were fitted but long enough to conceal what I wanted concealed, if you know what I mean. And I thrived in wide-legged pants. Anyone who thinks the Zoomers came up with the wide-legged pants trend needs to brush up on their history and read an issue of Seventeen from 30 years ago; Gen X and elder millennials wore them first. About my only issue with them was that many of those pants/jeans were too long for me. So what us “shorties” did then was cuff them up to the length that worked for us, then stapled it so it wouldn’t come loose. (Side note: I was a shortie then, and still a shortie now.)

One great thing about being a pre-teen/teen during the mid-90s was that our It brands were drugstore brands. It worked out for me because where I lived, we didn’t have a Sephora (Sephora kids in the 90s? They didn’t arrive in the States till 1998), and I didn’t have the pockets for brands like Estee Lauder and Chanel. (Those brands were also seen as brands our moms and aunts wore, and that wasn’t cool to us.) We thrived on stuff from Cover Girl, Maybelline, Neutrogena, and Noxzema. And our “clean girl” look then was a slick or two of Lip Smackers (bubble gum and cherry cola flavors for me!) and a few dabs of pressed powder to keep our mugs matte and that was it. The Sephora-addicted teens today could never.

A lot more after the cut…

*The Music*

I was heavily into R&B, pop, and rap that year. You best believe my butt was parked on the couch whenever MTV Jams came on! And 1996 was a banner year for all three genres. Nine out of the ten songs from Billboard’s Top 100 of 1996 represented one of those genres. It was also a time when music sold. Major singles going multi-platinum became the norm. And preteen me used to check out the Billboard charts in the newspaper to see if “One Sweet Day” stayed up top or got dethroned. What a wild four months that was.

A snippet of my “Best of 1996” playlist…

(This video was how I first learned who Dorothy Dandrige was. I’m also old enough to remember when Janet and Whitney were competing to play Dorothy in her biopic; that role ended up going to Halle Berry.)

(I’d post the music video to this song, but you’ll be hearing and seeing that abusive asshole Diddy in it. Just hearing him on the track is ick enough. It sucks because the rest of that video is perfection.)

I mean, this playlist can go on forever, but I got more to talk about than just music here. Before I jump subjects, I must say that I envy those who got to rave to these super long-ass mixes in the clubs 30 years ago. I would discover these mixes years after their debuts.

What a year for music.

*Heartthrobs* 

(From left to right, my crush objects of that year: R&B band 3T, actor David Faustino, and R&B band Immature.)

Other girls my age swooned over Johnathan Taylor Thomas, but these were my guys. Being into R&B music led me to bands like 3T and Immature, and I forgot if it was love at first sight, but they were definitely HOT to me. If I were to choose one band to date, though, it would have to be 3T. All three Jackson brothers were foine, and I only fell for Batman and Romeo of Immature. (It seems like every boy band has that one guy that doesn’t make all the ladies swoon.) It was rare to find my guys in the typical teenybopper mags like Tiger Beat and Teen Beat, so I ended up buying mags like Right On and Word Up! because that’s where they were.

And then there’s Faustino–my first celeb crush. Preteen me was not supposed to have been watching Married With Children, but my parents didn’t stop me (they didn’t care) so I always tuned in every week for Bud Bundy and the rude humor. I think my parents should’ve care because MWC was where I learned some curse words and how to talk back. 😆

(Side note: I found JTT too bland or my tastes, and if you remember seeing “I <3 JTT” scrawled on the bathroom walls, congrats–you’re an old like me.)

*Books of ’96* 

My favorite reads of the year were almost the same as 1995’s. I think I’ve been reading The Baby-sitters Club series since 1994, but I was introduced to the Goosebumps series in ’96. Their covers caught my eye, and their scary stories got me hooked. I appreciate a good horror novel as I do a tome for young girls. And if you’re wondering, Claudia was my favorite among the babysitters. We’re both Asian and junk food enthusiasts!

*Shows Of ’96*

What a time for kids TV. Hey Arnold, KaBlam!, and Dexter’s Laboratory premiered this year, and we still had peak Simpsons and Nicktoons. Nickelodeon kept me fed with My Brother And Me, Are You Afraid Of The Dark, The Secret World Of Alex Mack, All That, Space Cases, and Kenan And Kel. (Somehow, I don’t remember watching The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo.) I also tuned into Moesha (Brandy was one of my idols), MadTV, Beavis & Butthead, MTV Jams, and, of course, Married With Children. If my face wasn’t buried in a book, then it was glued to the TV and you can see why.

*The “Great Cartoon”*

Because we didn’t have DVR then, I would record my favorite cartoons and shows on VHS. I used part of my allowance to buy video tapes, and I remember labeling each tape specifically. One tape was for Simpsons, another tape was for Married With Children shows, and another tape was all for Nicktoons, with sub-labels so I’d know what exacts cartoons are on it, like Rugrats, Doug, Ahh! Real Monsters, and so forth. I also had tapes where I recorded all my ‘toons on one tape and labeled it “Great Cartoons!”, and numbering them along the way.

One morning, I went down to the living room to watch one of my cartoon tapes. Both my parents were out of the house, my younger brother was still sleeping, so it was cartoon time for me and only me. I popped in one of my “Great Cartoons!” tape in the VCR, and I was looking forward to starting my morning with some cereal and some ‘toons. Instead, what came on the TV screen was a movie. It looked like a weird movie of low-quality–nothing I would ever record. All I remember was seeing three people–two guys and a woman, all naked. Whatever they were doing, I didn’t care because I wanted to watch cartoons. I took out the tape, mad that someone taped over my recordings for a dumb-looking movie.

I later learned that what got taped over my cartoons was a shoddy-ass porno. I didn’t know what a porn movie was until probably late 1997. Some kids my age during this time had their intro to porn via Playboy magazines. Mines was a bad-looking porn tape. (I’m positive my dad was the culprit in this, but, of course, I never asked him about it.) That said, I would not think about that movie until I hit my teens a year later.

*****************

Now to close out my 1996 entry, here’s this throwback clip of the 1996 Democratic National Convention getting down to the song and the craze of 1996: the Macarena! (This happened 30 years ago this month!)