Smiley 180: Decade Update
By Phoebe Bebe
Junkie

Put away your legwarmers, crimper, and purple eye-makeup. It’s time to find those old middle school clothes. The truth has leaked from the CCLA slam-books: the Smiley decade-themed dance will be Smiley Early 90s, not Smiley 80s.

Forget the Bangles. This year’s cover band will rock out to good old Seattle grunge. The band is called Shrub, who plays—yes—the classic tunes of the likes of Bush (the inspiration for their name), Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Stone Temple Pilots. At the concert and party, expect plenty of Eddie Vedder (pre-boring Ticketmaster lawsuit and definitely pre-chopped hair) and Dave Pirner (maybe with a Reality Bites-era Winona Ryder on his arm) look-alikes. We can still expect Madonnas and Michael Jacksons, as long as they are era-appropriate.

Why the switch, you might ask? There are several reasons, according to our CCLA source. We’re growing up. The freshmen just don’t have that eighties sensibility, despite their higher SAT scores. Plus, Smiley 80s is sort of played out by now. It’s all the same stuff every year. We’re ready for L.A. Gear, Stussy, and Mossimo.

But there’s more to this story. There have been rumors for years that the administration would intervene and that CCLA had been fending off attacks on their most popular Spring Semester party of the past two years. Only this year, the threat was real. Something had to give.

Two years ago, the movie Blow came out, reminding us all once again what the eighties were really about: cocaine. Desperate students, looking for a way to reenergize Smiley 80s, found a glimmer of hope: this would be the one party a year whose main attraction wasn’t cheap beer. It would be blow.

The administration watched in silent horror as the cocaine use mounted at the college on that fateful, annual night. They were left silent, due to the paralyzing fear that “hard-drug use” would appear as one of the main characteristics of Pomona on our Princeton Review profile. It’s not as if nobody snorted coke before Blow came out; this was no new problem, but the administration could not stand by and watch any longer.

CCLA has argued in the past that the easiest solution would be switching the party from the eighties to the nineties. This did not fly with the administration.

As our source told us, “The last thing the administration wanted was a nineties party. ‘You think cocaine is bad?’ they said. ‘Well let’s not forget about heroin chic. Emaciated supermodels. Uma Thurman’s overdose in Pulp Fiction. AND TRAINSPOTTING! We can’t have TRAINSPOTTING at Pomona!’

Trainspotting came out in 1996, and Pulp Fiction came out in 1994. Both came squarely in the mid-nineties, when Calvin Klein printed those shameless ads of underage kids looking like junkies. It’s the nineties—but a specific part of the nineties.

So the compromise is early nineties. The early nineties was the time when we mourned the tragic death from overdose of River Phoenix and lamented the untimely suicide of the drug-addled Kurt Cobain—not to mention our favorite Saturday Night Live guys. We’d learned our lesson, for a time at least, a time lasting until Quentin Tarantino ruined everything. Dazed and Confused came out in 1993. The administration has no illusions that Smiley Early 90s will increase marijuana use; they’ve long given up on that, and the Princeton Review doesn’t care.

Plus, our beloved new governor ushered us into the early nineties with his 1991 hit Terminator 2. Let’s give credit where credit is due.