The middle school had a very important event last week. As part of some sort of Spirit Week, Bridget and the other kids had a chance to dress up for “80s Day” one day.

Since Maria and I went to high school and college right in the meat of that decade, we got pretty excited. Who doesn’t love a good tribute to the 80s?

So Maria dusted off some of her yearbooks to get some ideas for an outfit. She wanted to find something different like the old favorites of the Madonna look or the Flashdance off-the-shoulder sweatshirt.

I have an automatic reaction against the Flashdance look because one of my best friends and I snuck into the theater to see the movie with his older brother. None of us were old enough since it was rated R so we bought tickets to something else.

We hated Flashdance. Someone working at he theater caught us trying to sneak into a totally different movie and made us go back to watch Jennifer Beals dance some more. I will never forgive that person.

All that aside, the look inspired by that movie does scream 1980s as much as Madonna’s lace and Don Johnson’s pastel shirts. The funny thing is that a school full of kids dressed up that way last week when I never knew anyone who dressed like that 25 years ago.

Sure, I went to an all-boy’s private high school where I had to wear a shirt and tie every day, but we never dressed like the icons of the 80s in our spare time. I always laugh at some of the getups when I see pictures of people dressing like the 80s because the preppie look is never represented.

That’s the cliché I remember best. There’s nothing wrong with honoring those other cliches. I just find it funny that a whole decade is now defined by something I don’t ever remember seeing anyone wear.

That’s why the best advice we had for our daughter was to wear a jean jacket with some funny pins on it. We couldn’t think of anything else that really defined the 80s beyond the standard fare.

I remember jeans with a turtleneck sweater underneath a crewneck sweater. I remember way too short OP shorts. I remember Docksiders and Sperry Topsiders, with no socks of course. I remember t-shirts, especially those Co-Ed Naked (insert sport here) ones.

That is, when we wore t-shirts at all. As friends post old pictures from college on Facebook, the guys I hung around with all seemed to have difficulty wearing a shirt on a nice day. I don’t remember spending so many sunny days shirtless, but the evidence is right there.

If we had a son, I don’t think we could have gotten away with putting him in a pair of shorts and sending to school without a shirt to celebrate 80s Day. Sometimes you just have to give into the cliches instead of experiencing the real thing, I guess.