I Think She's Alone Now
If Memory Swerves™, ‘twas on this day in music history (June 24, 1987) that teen sensation Tiffany Darwish — pictured today, packin’ on the pounds, if not packin’ in the crowds — took the stage at a shopping center in Paramus, New Jersey. It was her first stop on a first-of-its-kind tour of department store collectives across the U.S., part of a marketing strategy to improve flagging record sales for the aspiring pop star. The concept of bringing her cutesy self to the very places where tween audiences made purchase decisions with their lemonade-stand monies proved fruitful, indeed. Let the Beatles have Shea Stadium, Jimi Hendrix, Monterey Pop and Bob Dylan, bloody Fairport Convention. Tiffany was cornering the market on makeshift food court stages, one lip-synched, thirty-minute show at a time! As the buzz grew, radio responded by playing her version of Tommy James and the Del Webb’s “I Think We’re Alone Now (Deadbolt the Door and Let’s Do This)” and taking it to Number One. Tiffany was now a bona fide star whose crowd-sourced shows surely tried the limited peacekeeping skills of the licensed — but not in an official police capacity — store security dunderheads. Fandemonium was at a frenzied, fever pitch and the attention-loving starlet was at the center of it. “Everywhere I go, I get mauled,” screamed a delighted Tiffany to a USA Today™ reporter on the bus after a show. With her frosty Orange Julius® in one hand and a super slim, super-calming menthol Capri® in the other, Tiffany then said prophetically, “We should start calling these places, ‘Shopping Mauls.’ (Long pull on cigarette, cough cough.)” And so ‘twas, the birth of that most American of mainstays — the bloody shopping maul, or rather, mall — all thanks to a perky songbird with the name of an upscale plate maker. Today, the former teen idol and her hair extensions can be found gracing — or rather, disgracing — the pages of Playboy® magazine or on the telly on shows like, “How I Met Your Mother’s Plastic Surgeon” and “Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Something Or Other.” I think she's alone now, which is to say, unagented.
