1982 (38 page)

Benny was a thirteen-year-old reading this stuff to a bunch of eleven-year-olds. I never quite understood what I was
supposed to be experiencing when I listened to Benny read tales from
Sex Takes a Holiday
, but I know it was exciting. It was also illicit and somehow very wrong. That made it more exciting. Benny was royalty for a while in our circle as the proprietor of the used
Hustler
and
Penthouse
collections.

By the 1980s, we were much smoother about these things. We had gotten older and had graduated to watching nudity on TV thanks to
Baby Blue Movies
on Friday nights.
Baby Blue Movies
had originally begun in the 1970s as a publicity stunt for the independent Toronto TV network called Citytv. We also knew it as Channel 79. The visionary behind this new TV station, Moses Znaimer, had embraced the notion that late-night sex on television could be popular. Or at least that it would bring notoriety. The idea was that late on Friday nights, Citytv would air soft-core porn. It worked. It brought the station some attention, and the practice carried into the ’80s before it was discontinued.

The possibility of seeing these movies on TV was not lost on us kids. Starting in 1980, I would host sleepovers at my place on Friday nights. I’d invite some of the boys over, and we’d lay sleeping bags on the floor of our family room and tell my parents we were going to sleep. Then we would turn on our console TV with the volume very low and quietly watch the movies on Channel 79 in our sleeping bags. Sometimes there was snickering. Sometimes there was silence. Sometimes there were other sounds. But the practice was clearly rewarding enough for us to do it on a few occasions. I really don’t know who
Baby Blue Movies
was aimed at. The movies weren’t very explicit, and the storylines were abysmal. In retrospect, they were probably for boys like us. I still don’t know if my parents
knew what we were doing. I assume they did. Sometimes my parents had the sense to let boys do their thing.

In 1981, a new and very unique film called
Quest for Fire
got wide release in theatres. It was an interesting, quality movie about prehistoric tribespeople discovering a source of fire for the first time. It was shot and performed with an attempt at cinematic authenticity, including grunting, hunting, and the skimpy outfits prehistoric people wore before we had Calvin Klein. All I knew about the film was that there were naked women in it. That’s because in prehistoric times people ran around naked. I convinced my father to take me to see
Quest for Fire
on the giant screen at the University Theatre on Bloor Street in downtown Toronto. I was thirteen, and well equipped with arguments to sell my father on the idea.

“But what thees film ees?” my father said.

“Dad! It’s a film about how the world started, and about fire and people in the beginning of the world!”

“Thees ees good film you want to see?”

“Yes! Yes, Dad. It’s about history. You know how you like me to learn about history. It’s like a documentary.”

It wasn’t a documentary. My father relented and took me to see
Quest for Fire
at a weekend matinee. I will not forget the feeling of my father glaring at me in the theatre when the first nude scene came on. I kept looking straight ahead. I could feel my father’s anger. Or bemusement. I’m not sure which. I avoided making eye contact with him.

Either way, it was titillating to see
Quest for Fire
. Then again, it was also terrifying to anticipate what my father might say after the movie ended. We didn’t speak much on the way home. Later that night at family dinner, my mother asked what
the film was like. “Thees film ees full of the naked woman,” my father replied. My mother said
“Vah-ee”
and gave a disapproving wave of her hand. I may have been a bit embarrassed, but I was glad I had experienced my first full-on, big-screen nudity.

Traditional ideas about what was sexy and my alternative cultural tastes didn’t always match. For all the excitement, I found it difficult to reconcile mainstream “sex culture” with my New Wave aspirations. As much as soft-core movies and dirty magazines informed me about what I was supposed to consider desirable, I had trouble with some of the orthodox examples of what was sexy. Don’t get me wrong, the first time I saw Ann-Margret in a rerun of the Who’s
Tommy
, I was sold on sexy. That scene with her and the beans is mandatory fodder for excitable youth. And I don’t remember a time when I didn’t consider Brigitte Bardot or Farrah Fawcett attractive. But much of the pop-culture stuff never made sense to me. I didn’t understand why Bo Derek had to put those beads in her hair. And I couldn’t figure out why Jessica Lange acted so flakey when she was being sexy in the new version of
King Kong
when I was a kid. And when I went to see the movie
Grease
with my mother and sister when I was eleven, I was quite convinced Olivia Newton-John was much prettier before she got a perm and wore the black leather pants. All of this was the opposite of what I was supposed to think was sexy according to magazines and dirty movies.

Who knows what I would have considered “hot” if I hadn’t been bombarded with pop culture throughout my youth. The idea of what you find attractive and what you’re socialized to believe is sexy changes as you grow. When I was
a little kid I used to watch reruns of
Gilligan’s Island
, and I would wonder what all the fuss was about Ginger, the sultry actress on the island in the ball gown. Mary Ann was always more attractive to me in her little shorts and red shirt. Then, when I hit eleven or twelve, I started to understand the appeal of Ginger as the sex kitten. Mind you, I will forever have a thing for Mary Ann.

Even further, by the time
WKRP in Cincinnati
finished its run on TV in September 1982, I understood why everyone considered Jennifer Marlowe, the receptionist, to be a sexual bombshell. Loni Anderson played the role of Jennifer on
WKRP
, and she had bleached-blond hair and giant bosoms and tanned legs and high heels. But by my mid-teens, I was much less interested in Jennifer than I was in Bailey Quarters, played by Jan Smithers, who was a more peripheral character. Bailey was a brunette who wore glasses, and she was smart and quirky. If I were to fantasize about anyone on that show, I was more likely to focus on Bailey. She wasn’t New Wave, but she was less mainstream and predictable.

I have made a short list of qualities that made Bailey Quarters, the reporter and ingenue on
WKRP
, sexier than Jennifer Marlowe:

nerdy

journalism grad (summa cum laude)

Diane Keatonesque

hard working

intelligent

environmentalist (Bailey even campaigned against nuclear power in one episode!)

As you can see, Bailey was quite impressive. And you might think I’m trying to take the high road by saying I liked the intelligent girl better. I’m really not. Bailey was very pretty, too. If you don’t think so, you haven’t seen the episodes where Bailey really lets her hair down and takes off her glasses. It’s just that I always imagined I would have more in common with Bailey, and that made her particularly sexy. Similarly, I could look at the hot, blond Jennifer Marlowe cheerleader types at Thornlea and recognize that they were very attractive but be more drawn to the New Wave girls or brunettes or punks like Dani Elwell and Wendy. They were more in the category of Bowie, after all. And a girl named Paula Silverman was somewhere in between. Paula Silverman also helped me learn about sex.

I met Paula Silverman in typewriting class in Grade 9 at Thornlea. Between theatre and music and history classes, all of which happened on the second floor, where I was most likely to see Wendy, I would head downstairs to the lower floor of our high school to attend instruction in core subjects like typewriting. I’m not making this up. Typewriting class really existed.

We learned to type in typewriting class. Now you learn to type when you’re two years old. But in 1982, we didn’t have computers for everything. We had a separate class for computers. That’s where we learned how to use a PET computer. The Commodore PET was first released in 1977 and discontinued in 1982. But not before we were taught to try to use it at Thornlea in Grade 9. It wasn’t clear what we would ever be able to do on a PET computer. It was bulky and black and white and riddled with code and seemingly quite useless. But we knew it was important to learn. It was the future. On
the other hand, in typewriting class we were taught where to place our fingers and how to type words without looking at the keys or the paper we were typing on. This was so we would be able to use typewriters until computers became useful. Then we could type on computers. It was an odd time of transition.