Latte Trouble - By Cleo Coyle Page 0,63

a line of customers at the counter, Moira and Matt were busily mixing coffee drinks behind the bar. Either things got crazy and my ex had volunteered to pitch in, or Matt was deliberately exercising his barista skills in anticipation of demonstrations for investors in his kiosk scheme.

Esther spied me as I rushed by and was about to call out. I shushed her with my hand, then flashed her ten fingers. “Back in ten minutes” I mouthed to her. Then I raced up the spiral staircase in the dining room.

Inside my small, second-floor office I tossed my purse on the desk, peeled off my coat, and fired up the computer. Since I knew next to nothing about the history of Lottie’s label, I decided to use the Internet to see what I could turn up. I began by Googling the name “Lottie Harmon.” The search yielded 9,003 entries. I narrowed the search by entering “history of Lottie Harmon label.” That brought me a workable 1,456 entries—workable because hundreds of links were essentially the same story, a reprint of a long and uninformative (for my purposes anyway) press release issued by Rena Garcia when the label was resurrected last year. I eliminated all of those entries and narrowed the search to the early 1980s—the first blush of the Lottie Harmon line. I came up with a tidy 717 entries and began calling them up.

After eliminating the useless links, the most common of which was a widely reprinted Associated Press Hollywood glitz and glamour story featuring the passage “…Morgan Fairchild and Lottie Harmon accessories…” I ended up with only 295 entries. Realizing this might take longer than I thought, I began to look through them. I struck gold on the fifth entry, when I followed a link to a 1980s nostalgia Web site.

The homepage for EightiesNeverDied.com featured a montage of pop culture icons posed along the lines of the old album cover for the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There were television stars like Larry Hagman as Dallas heel J.R. Ewing; Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown; Don Johnson looking suave as Sonny Crockett on Miami Vice; Johnny Depp, Richard Grieco, and the rest of the cast from 21 Jump Street; Michael J. Fox; and Al Bundy.

Music was represented by Devo sporting their signature red plastic domes, Madonna looking anything but virginal, Billy Idol’s sneer, Boy George, Duran Duran, George Michael, and Michael Jackson. Featured movie stars came from the signature films of the era—Jennifer Beals in her oversized sweatshirt from Flashdance; Tom Cruise in his skivvies from Risky Business; Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones; Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing pecs as Conan the Barbarian; Michael Douglas, hair slicked back as Gordon Gecko from Wall Street; and a knife-wielding Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

In the background, presiding over all, the twinkling eyes of President Ronald Wilson Reagan, The Gipper. Down either side of the page were plenty of links to various aspects of life in the 1980s, all with catchy titles like “Decade of Greed” for the business section (though it seemed to me there’d been as much or more greed and ruthless dishonesty during the dot bomb bubble of the 1990s), “We Are the Music,” “The Vices of Television,” “Cold War,” “Idol Worship,” “Go Goth,” and more of the same.

I followed the link dubbed “Shoulder-pads and Legwarmers” and found an eighties fashion page with a list of articles. Most of the features, I learned, had been culled from the fashion magazines of the day, the pages dutifully scanned and posted on the site by its webmaster—probably in violation of numerous copyright laws. There were articles about Michael Jackson’s lone glove, the fashion sense in Dallas and Miami Vice, male makeup. Finally I spied a link called “Spangles” and recalled that Lottie Harmon had invented the famous glittering tie-bar. I hit the link and it took me to a Trend magazine article from 1980 titled “Designing Women.”

The piece featured a captioned photo taken at New York, New York, one of the trendier Manhattan discotheques of that long-gone era. The scene was a crowded dance floor with three women in the foreground. The central figure appeared to be the scarlet-haired Lottie of over twenty years ago—in her early thirties. Below the photo the caption read “The rewards of working for Lottie…sushi, and an evening at a hot new club.” I looked at the two other women in the frame. Both appeared to be younger than Lottie. One was a very pretty brunette, the other had