The Bizarre 1980s Today

If you're a Netflix junkie like moi then you're familiar with the comedy show GLOW (about the bizarre 1980s female wrestling show), and Wild Wild Country (about the bizarre cult-commune in Oregon during the early 1980s). 

What's most bizarre is the fact that these shows exist at all. Why, after thirty-something years, are these otherwise completely forgotten 1980s phenomena back and more popular than ever? They were small relics, minor curiosities of a long-gone decade, and suddenly they're big-time today.  

The Internet -- specifically streaming services -- are really amazing things. They manage to dredge of parts of the past we didn't know still existed. But they're part of something broader, I think, an attempt to try to understand the past in order to understand our bizarre present. And the past, it turns out, was truly bizarre.

One such forgotten story now being resurrected (although not on Netflix, not yet) was the story of Bess Myerson -- the Bronx girl who became the first (and only) Jewish Miss America in 1945, then became a political and cultural doyenne of NYC in the 1960s and '70s until she became sleazy tabloid fodder in the late 1980s when she went on trial for trying to bribe a judge. Her case was, and the cast of "only in New York" characters were truly ... bizarre. 

And now her daughter, of all people, is mounting a play about her mother out in California, about their relationship and what it was like to be the daughter of a woman who was once admired, then admonished, by the world.

It's yet another once forgotten bizarre story from the 1980s now suddenly remembered again.