My visceral reactions to GLOW: delving in to my childhood during the 1980's

I recently watched GLOW - the Netflix TV series about the 1980's female wrestling show of the same name (Gorgeous Ladies Of Wresting) and was extremely surprised that seeing the styles of the 80's and hearing the music had a deep / profound impact on me.  It hit me.  It connected.  I was 9-10 years old at the that time, but hated it!  It's not that I decried the music publicly but secretly loved - I have no memory of ever enjoying it.  I wrote this blog post to explore why I deeply enjoyed it now, and have loved watching GLOW.

GLOW is set in the mid-80's (1985-1986), and I was 9-10 years old at the time.  That's 4th grade - I don't have much memory of pop-culture influencing me at that time.  I feel like that didn't start to happen until 6th grade and onwards.  But it must have been there in the background, TV shows, music on the radio.  Being in rural Western NY (WNY) state (nearest to Buffalo NY but definitely not part of Buffalo), my impression was always been that there is a lag for pop culture, fashion to reach us.  So perhaps that lag might mean that the music / styles of GLOW didn't reach WNY until 1989, when I was few years older and starting to notice pop culture.  

I remember hearing songs from GLOW soundtrack when going roller skating on Friday nights (there was randomly a very small amusement park with a rink ~1 mile from our house) - and that was 6th-8th grade.  I certainly heard some of it when I worked as dishwasher in a local restaurant (summers 9th and 10th grade). 

I always felts like an outsider growing up.  In hindsight partly this is just who I am - but partly it was the culture of the area, and the clash between that culture and my family's beliefs and values.  The vast majority were white, Anglo-Saxon (Swedish from way back actually), protestant.  Some were Italian and/or Catholic.  I don't remember my classmates really differentiating between these, but I very clearly remember my 10th grade English teacher saying when she was young in the area, Italians / Catholic were very much looked down on.  All in all, white and Christian was > 90% of the population (at least from my perspective).  Contrast with my family:  my dad converted to Judaism.  There was one other family in the entire school district that was Jewish, and they were not converts.  My parents had a pretty easy going attitude towards religion, and this was mind-blowing to my classmates, completely unheard of - to them, you were born into your religion and you stayed with it.  Going to church was religious and of course social, and I was completely excluded from that.  I'm not blaming anyone for this and in hindsight I wouldn't change it, but it certainly cut me out of lot large chunk of social functions with my classmates.

I write the above about my feeling excluded to rationalize why I didn't like 80's pop culture.  I wasn't part of my local culture; they were into and enjoying the general US 1980's culture; ergo I was not.  Caveat / exception was heavy metal / hard rock - at least my understanding of it at that time - but this seemed to be a reaction against pop culture.  Side note, when I got exposed to Pearl Jam and Nirvana and early 90's music, my mind absolutely exploded - I have to say it must partly be because I was impressionable, I was the right age to be imprinted - but also because it seemed to me to be rejecting everything about the 80's - whether pop culture or heavy metal or hard rock or glam rock.  (I also started to associate heavy metal / hard rock with bullies at my school, so I was happy to reject that as well - and the timing coincided with my physical development that allowed me to be less prone to bullying).

The above context is critical to me to explain my visceral / strong / emotional response to GLOW.  What resonated with me about GLOW is the group of women who are not the most popular, not the most successful, not perfect, but they are living in the 80's, enjoying the culture, enjoying what they have in the moment.  They are real!  They are relatable, admirable, heroic, flawed.  Watching GLOW broke the connection in my mind between 80's pop culture being owned by the "in-crowd" that I was not part of, allowing my suppressed appreciation and enjoyment of the 80's to come rushing in.  It turns out I do enjoy that music that at that time I couldn't stand.

To be fair I had hints of this before GLOW - commiserating with a friend I grew up with who was in a similar situation, I remember admitting to him a few years ago that I did enjoy some of the "classic rock" (1970's) that we so despised at the time.  He also worked in the same restaurant where I washed dishes (and sometimes cooked) during high school summers, and the classic rock of the time and pop music was playing constantly in the kitchen.  It imprinted on me, and although I wouldn't have admitted it at the time - for fear of losing the small tenuous connection to the social group I was somewhat part of - I did enjoy it (although to be fair the rotation repeated a lot and we could start to predict the same song because they didn't even mix up the order they played songs in on the local radio stations).  

Another part of the story is that for some reason towards the end of grad school, and certainly during my post-doc, I greatly reduced the f*cks I had to give about people's negative opinions about things I enjoyed - web comics and dungeons's and dragons being foremost among them.  I wish that had happened earlier, it was very liberating.  That allowed me to completely submerse myself in the world of GLOW.