Those Yellow Rubber Bands

So, I've been thinking a lot about those "livestrong" wristbands recently. They kinda blow my mind. I'm trying to think of another phenomenon that's become so very widespread and so very ripped off. EVERYBODY was wearing those things last summer -- it was a trend that cut across demographic, socioeconomic status, race, creed, personality archetype, EVERYTHING. from the five year old kid on the subway to then-Prexy-candidate Kerry, everyone was rocking that thing. And then every other cause decided to join in -- there are pink ones for breast cancer and red ones for AIDS and (my very fave) a lime green one for lyme disease. Dig this list! It's crazy! There's a rubber bracelet for everything! And some colors have more than one cause! If you're wearing a burgundy bracelet, you might be supporting women who've had C-sections, or you might be supporting headache-sufferers. Or maybe multiple myeloma. Or hospice care. And that green one I like so much? It might mean you're supporting people who are coping with Childhood Depression, Kidney Transplantees (or -ers), Depression, Lyme Disease, the Environment, Genocide in Darfur, Mental Retardation, Organ Donation, Tissue Donation, Worker Safety, Lymphoma, or Kidney Cancer.

And before the livestrong jammies, no one wore those rubberband bracelets. The closest I ever came was finding a really fat rubber band once and wrapping it around my hand to form two claws, and then I pretended I was a lobster.

So all's I'm saying is that the all-pervasiveness of the rubber-bracelet trend blows my mind. We went from nobody-wearing-rubber-bracelets to everyone-wearing-yellow-rubber-bracelets to every-cause-gets-a-bracelet in very little time. Can anyone else think of a trend that not only took over the nation but has also been spun-off in so many ways?

Speaking of livestrong, I met the lovely Linda Armstrong Kelly yesterday in the greenroom at MSNBC. She was there to talk about the new livestrong laptop -- when one purchases it, $50 of your purchase goes to cancer research (AWESOME!). She was wearing all sorts of yellow accents -- two livestrong bracelets, a big puffy flower in the same shade of yellow, yellow hairthingie. Very cool and very committed and very proud of her son and the movement he's started. So very inspiring. Not just the whole winning-the-bike-race and beating-cancer thing ... the starting a trend that spreads like motherforking wildfire.