Videocity
Bebe's Kids
by Tabitha Vidaurri
Recently small things have been sending me down a k-hole of nostalgia. I think part of it is the fact that my sister is on the other side of the country and I desperately miss her. The other part is that my friends and I are part of a shitty, forgotten generation. We’re too old to be Millennials, and too young to be Gen-Xers so I’ve taken it upon myself to name us Bebe’s Kids.
Instead of writing a big long farty op-ed piece about “my generation” here is a simple story that I think sums it up:
When I was a wee girl we used to go to Hollywood Video out in Parsippany, NJ. Before that we used to go to Dollar Video but Mom stopped because it was “too seedy” which I now realize meant they did a crappy job of keeping the porno separated from the regular videos. Mom got excited about renting The Public Eye one time only to find out it was The Pubic Eye.
Anyway, Hollywood Video was fun because they sold 10 Pogs for a dollar. I used to collect Simpsons pogs. I also liked to go into the horror movie section and read the description of Monkey Shines over and over again. Then of course we’d rent something appropriate for the whole family to watch, like Captain Ron or Hook. This Hollywood Video had a big cardboard cutout for the movie Bebe’s Kids, which was animated, featuring Bebe(?) perched atop a roller coaster with his crazy kids. This movie seemed to have everything: laughs, thrills, black people, and the tantalizing cardboard cutout was up for several years. We asked my mom if we could rent Bebe’s Kids and she said no. We kept asking her, every time, it was like a tradition, like the Pogs, and like my Stepdad calling my brother a faggot. Mom never made it clear why we weren’t allowed to rent Bebe’s Kids. We could never figure out why. It had Kids in the title, so we should be allowed to watch it, duh.
Flash forward to last week and I’m at a small party celebrating the fact that my friend Robin is back on the East Coast and she shows me a blog called My Dick Looks Great in These Heels. And it’s just that - penises in high heels. And it is really quite entertaining. There are captions underneath each photo that say things like “911 was an inside job.” One of them said “Bebe’s Kids” and no one knew what that was so I told this very story. It was as anticlimactic then as it is now.
If you were born in the early 80s, please spread the word that this is our new name: Generation Bebe’s Kids. We’re weird, we were pretty much raised by VCR’s, we’re tired of how fucked up the climate is and the fucking racism and gay bashing, so really, why not stick your dick in a shoe and then write a thing about 911 underneath it because seriously, what the fuck is even happening anymore?
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