From Teen-Age Land comes a new species: the Val Gal
All of a sudden, from Tarzana, Calif., to Tarrytown, N.Y., everyone with a teen-age daughter is wondering: Is she one? A Valley Girl, that is. If she's from a fairly well-to-do family, and between the ages of 13 and 17, chances are she is. If her passions are shopping, popularity, pigging out on junk food and piling on cosmetics, the answer is probably "fer shurr." If she is almost unintelligible, the verdict can only be: "Totally." Particularly if she pronounces the word "Toe-dully."
A Val Gal does not have to come from California's San Fernando Valley, though indeed the subspecies Puella americana vallensis (PAV) was first identified in that beige outreach of Los Angeles. She can equally well be from some honker place like Lake Forest, Ill., or Longeyeland. She got to be called a Valley Girl because of the hot five-minute single record by that name in which Frank Zappa and his maximum brilliant 15-year-old daughter Moon Unit lampooned the San Fernando species and its tribal habits. Valley Girls are by no means mere pubescent versions of the California Girl but exist, in differing regional colorations, from coast to coast. Like Zappa, puts it:
Last idea to cross her mind
Had something to do with where to
find
A pair of jeans to fit her butt
And where to get her toenails cut.
Meanwhile, a lot of Melvins who must have Val daughters have been writing them up in neat magazines and newspapers, not to mention major cool calendars, coloring books, beach towels, T shirts and lapel buttons. Two books on the Valley Girl's way of life are to be published in the next few weeks. CBS's fall lineup even has a sitcom called Square Pegs featuring a PAV.
A lot of space cadets assume that Val Gals are simply updated versions of the 1940s bobbysoxer. Kiss my tuna! One conspicuous difference: the amount of billies a true Val pours into clothes, sunglasses, tanning oil, lip gloss, Tab, Doritos, Kahlúa brownies, Bubblicious chewing gum, beer (Heinies and Lowies), burritos, movies, Harlequin romances, records (anything by Journey, Rush, Van Halen, AC/DC) and movies (alltime fave: Mommie Dearest). Other Total Necessities: a blow dryer, a Walkman and at least one gold chain. PAVs are obsessed with fashion, crowding mondo cool stores from the Galleria in Sherman Oaks, Calif., to the Galleria in White Plains, N. Y. (Minis and ruffles, short pants and denim jackets with the collar turned up and cuffs rolled back are in.) Top status possessions are a horse, a health-club membership and a monthly clothing allowance. A rilly killer bedroom has a waterbed, little baskets full of cosmetics, a mega sound system, wind chimes, posters of favorite bands and, of course, a private phone. All PAVs dream of arriving at the beach in awesome cruisemobiles like Mercedes and Rabbit convertibles, but sometimes are reduced to taking the bus or being chauffeured by their mothers.