ISSUE DATE: May 27, 1985
THE BUZZ:
Now then, parents, the important thing is to stay calm. You’ve seen Madonna wiggling on MTV — right, she’s the pop-tart singer with the trashy outfits and the hi-there belly button. What is worse, your children have seen her. You tell your daughters to put on jeans and sweatshirts, like decent girls, and they look at you as if you’ve just blown in from the Planet of the Creeps. Twelve-year-old girls, headphones blocking out the voices of reason, are running around wearing T shirts labeled VIRGIN, which would not have been necessary 30 years ago. The shirts offer no guarantees, moreover; they merely advertise Madonna’s first, or virgin, rock tour, now thundering across the continent, and her bouncy, love-it-when-you-do-it song “Like a Virgin.”
The bright side of this phenomenon is that these Wanna Be’s (as in “We wanna be like Madonna!”) could be out somewhere stealing hubcaps. Instead, all of them, hundreds of thousands of young blossoms whose actual ages run from a low of about eight to a high of perhaps 25, are saving up their baby-sitting money to buy cross-shaped earrings and fluorescent rubber bracelets like Madonna’s, white lace tights that they will cut off at the ankles and black tube skirts that, out of view of their parents, they will roll down several turns at the waist to expose their middles and the waistbands of the pantyhose.
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