I assumed a valid career path entailed solving crimes, a red sports car, and a black friend with a helicopter.
what’s this from?
You obviously didn’t go to high school in the South. In regard to football and cheerleaders at my high school, Hollywood wasn’t too far off the mark.
I toured the Washington Post newsroom on a school trip with a girl (my soon-to-be very first girlfriend) who understood ASL. She spotted two deaf guys in the background talking about strolling off to the print room for a spliff. Maybe you should keep a dime bag of Maui Wowee, as well.
I was certain that two or three classmates would die by jumping off the roof in the angel dust-induced belief they could fly. (On the othe hand, no TV show ever intimated that I would lose one to suicide.)
That any female walking alone after dark would receive unwanted attention. And maybe be raped and/or killed.
I’ve visited London and Paris both, a handful of times. In none of those vacations have I ever had a hotel room with a view of Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower.
I lived in NYC for 20 years, but never did I hang out with the exact same group of people at a diner / coffee-shop on a weekly basis.
I never met my evil twin double.
When TV shows do Halloween-themed episodes, the kids and the adults are shown in costumes that look like they are the product of professional makeup and costume people, probably because they are. When I was a kid, I always wondered why the costumes I tried to throw together for Halloween never looked that good.
Also, Halloween usually does not include any elaborate pranks that require half a dozen accomplices and some seriously intricate stage-setting.
A sitcom riffing on “To Build a Fire” by Jack London?
I thought that, unless you were a popular football player, girls would find you (you = teenage boy) annoying and they’d prefer that you leave them alone. So, in my shyness, I thought I was being a good person for not talking to them.
I also thought that, if you have a relationship in high school, you will go to different colleges and have a painful and somewhat protracted breakup. (And a relationship in college would have a similar painful breakup when you got jobs in different states.) So I thought it was unwise to have relationships until one reaches the adult working world.
Thanks, assorted television movies and bullshit sitcoms!
I did in the Bronx when I was in my 20s. At least, the same group of friends would go to the same bars, and often end up at the diner at some point during the night. (We knew the menu pretty much by heart.)
I learned that there are readily available, easy to obtain substances that you can take or slip to others unknowingly that will make you (or them)
Very smart
Very funny
Very strong
Fall asleep
Forget everything
Hear everything
Stay awake
Put the room in suspended animation.
Laugh and giggle
Totally change personality (Jekell/Hyde)
This “device” was used in so many 60’s and 70’s sitcoms. (Gilligan’s Island was really bad about it)