I think it was mainly the late hours that was the draw. I recall an acquaintance of mine telling the waiter, "I'd like my coffee black... like my soul."
Yeah, it was Bickfords in the 90s in my neck of the woods. Though Goths hadn't really been codified as such then. Still kind of a conglomerate of metalheads, stoners, and kids who wore black. Wasn't until maybe 98-99 I heard the term "Goth," but we didn't have much internet then.
Boy, that takes me back! There was a Bickford's across the street from the building I used to work at in Baltimore. Ate a lot of lunches and more than one breakfast there. When I went past there a few years ago, it was gone. I wonder if there are any still around.
Just two apparently. Both in Massachusetts, rebranded under Bickford's Grille. According to Wikipedia, there used to be over 80, most of them in the New England and New York. It doesn't appear as if they were franchised either, so they must have had a dense corporate structure, which would have taken operational costs through the roof. Same issue I have currently, trying to balance independent businesses that need to pay for themselves and the corporate umbrella that runs them. But I guess they had some union problems when fast food restaurants started hiring non-union members in the 1960s. Pretty fascinating, as the restaurant industry has never been unionized. Hotels and casinos, definitely, but around here unions aren't a thing at all. Maybe in some of the larger cities or bigger chains they are, but I've never seen it in my experience.
SM videos. There was a movie titled Videodrome made in 1983 where the characters watched a movie that had one or two second-long scenes of tied up women getting whipped. One of the big shocking revelations was when a character found out that it wasn't camera tricks – the women were REALLY whipped. Today there are tons of videos tens or twenty minutes long where tied up women (or men) are visibly whipped for real, screaming, their bodies in bruises. Had the characters of Videodrome seen that, they would have dropped dead instantly from the shock.
Hmm, I like the suggestions of weed, blue laws, and homosexuality. Possibly reading Tolkien as well. The sketch pretty much takes a typical 80's metal band (take Judas Priest, even though they're a 70's band), and they're recording a new song in the studio. The lyrics start off relatively normal, then it starts mentioning these types of things (smoking weed, stores being open on Sundays, etc.), and the manager gets very upset, and says they can't say that kinda stuff. As it goes on, the stuff that's considered taboo gets more and more ridiculous, until they change the lyrics to include dosing people with quaaludes. Aaaaand... all good! That's a wrap!
You should have mentioned that earlier. I'd say maybe candid discussion of masturbation was not as common as it is today. It was much more subtle back then.
"Sometimes I imagine in my declining years running a small joint in Manchester, England, catering to the specialists exclusive — to let them know they're amongst their own maybe I'll operate from the corner hanging upside down like a fucking bat." --- Al Swearengen, Deadwood
The "specialist" was the nipple-licker in that scene, right? Great show. Very quotable. The term "hopplehead" added an entire new suite of insults to my repetoire.
Pretty much anything in Teen Vogue recently. It started out as a kind of Tiger Beat cute boy band ogling clone but since 2016 has become very involved in politics, sex, and sexuality.
I'm not sure if those would be considered "normal" even today, but I'm sure there is plenty of stuff on the Internet that would have been taboo or illegal somewhere, at some time, that wouldn't rate a second glance today.
I'm old enough to remember a time when condoms were sold only in drug stores and pharmacies, and they were not on display on a shelf. They were kept under the counter, and the buyer had to specifically ask for them. I don't remember just when that ended, but it was sometime around the 1970s or 1980s.
I was pretty surprised to see run-of-the-mill drugstores (Walgreen's, CVS) selling vibrators openly on the shelf next to the condoms and such last time I was home. And none of that Publishers Clearing House "shoulder massager" nonsense either, they had Rabbits.
If they cared about prevention of disease, they’d have encased gas station toilets in lead and dumped them in the sea.
Within the professional wrestling industry, they were fiercely protective of the idea that it was "real" and not a "work" it was called kayabe or something (damn spell check!!!) It wasn't til the 90s that Vince McMahon pulled back the veil and identified it as "sports entertainment."
I think it's kayfabe. I've also heard that the WWE (WWF at the time) admitted it was fake so they wouldn't have to spend money on emergency services at their 'sporting events', but not sure that's true because, fake or not, it's dangerous.
