Yes, the pill had been invented. And Mary Quant started making miniskirts around 1958, and James Dean died in 1955 and Hugh Hefner started Playboy in 1953.
But in 1967 none of the girls in my senior class were on the pill, because it was virtually impossible for a high school girl to obtain.
And none of them were wearing miniskirts either, no matter how many Beatles films you saw, because the staid downtown department stores didn’t carry them and there were no hip boutiques to be found in the hinterlands.
And the boys didn’t wear blue jeans to school, because they were still forbidden. Girls didn’t wear them either. As a matter of fact, they didn’t wear slacks of any kind, because skirts were still the rule. Nobody wore shorts. Boys did not wear facial hair. All that was in the future.
When the media look back at 1967, it’s all hippies and Vietnam. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The average high school class of 1967 looked and acted almost indistinguishably from the average high school class of 1957. This was true for most colleges as well. Daily life was far more Leave it to Beaver than it was The Monkees. (Don’t forget that Ben as a matter of course wears a suit to go out with Mrs. Robinson.)
Most of what we today associate with the 1960s did not spread deeply into the general culture until the early 1970s. This is the great lost secret of the 60s: they didn’t happen then. And this is why it has become almost impossible for people to look back and make sense of the era. They associate the wrong behaviors with the wrong years.
I never heard him as being sarcastic on that song, which, since it is from Self Portrait is a total mess anyway. I don’t recall ever hearing of a Dylan - Siimon feud - it’s not mentioned in any of the Dylan bios I’ve read, or in any of the coverage of the Dylan - Simon tour. I rather think Dylan was trying to be funky on that cover, with the pitiful double tracking and all.
If you want to hear vitriolic sarcasm, check out Rolling Stone on the “Albert Hall” concert official bootleg, or many of the conversations on Don’t Look Back. Early Dylan did vitriolic sarcasm better than just about anybody.
Well, here’s to you, Mr bienville
People love your posts more that you would know (wo wo wo)
Where have you gone Mr bienville
The Straight Dope turns its lonely eyes to you.
My only problem with the movie is that it omits the part about Ben’s roadtrip. In the novel, he comes home after bumming around the country and tells his dad how pathetic and boring the rest of the world is, and how disillusioned he’s become about it. Only then does he take Mrs Robinson up on her offer.
In the movie, there’s a cut from Ben scuba diving in the swimming pool to him talking to Mrs Robinson on the phone. The novel provides much stronger motivation than just relieving his post-graduate boredom.
I suspect that the above sequence was filmed but ended up on the cutting room floor, due either to constraints on running time or simply because someone felt it slowed the pace of the movie.