I was just paging through the September Vogue – hundreds and hundreds of pages of sumptuous visuals. blissful sigh
Anyway, Balenciaga had an ad with a pantsuit (sic) that was very, very '60s. “Very '60s,” thought I – who remember the '60s, since my drug use didn’t kick in till the '70s.
But I digress.
So I’m meditating on the fashions of the '60s, which I remember, and thinking about the fact that the period in question is 40 years ago.
And in the '60s, the '20s were 40 years ago, and there were plenty of people running around who remembered the '20s. Like, yanno, my parents. Who were the age then – or a little younger – than I am now.
Yikes.
Fellow boomers, don’t go there. Just – don’t. It’s creepy.
I know how you feel. I was talking with some coworkers about the Bicentennial only to discover that most of them hadn’t been born yet (I was 7) and that the 200th anniversary of our country was 29 years ago! Hell, John Lennon has been dead for 25 years. Where did all that time go?
My bowling partner, who isn’t that much younger than me ( I tend to think she is my age because she is so level headed and mature.) has never used a rotary phone and didn’t know that women’s pads use to come in the belted variety.
In a conversation the other day it came up that when we were in school, WWII seemed like it was ancient history (before we were born), and with WWII ending in 1945 and the Viet Nam war ending in 1975, now in 2005 Viet Nam is the same distance in the past for today’s kids as WWII was for us.
Up until a year and a half ago I had a rotary phone. One day both my sisters were over, the younger with her two children. The older nephew was nine then.
My middle sister had to make a call after being paged on her beeper. So she used my phone. Nephew watches her with a sort of curious look, and afterwards asked “How do you do that?”
In my high school yearbook there is a photoad in the back, for a local gas station. You can clearly see the price of gas( in 1973) 23.9 cents per gallon. AAAAAgh!
a funny story (about an un-funny subject) :
a teacher ran into an unexpected difficulty explaining the Nazi holocaust to 11 year olds: one kid innocently asked "I can see why the people in the railroad cars didnt know about the death camps, but once they arrived there, why didnt they use their cell phones to notify others?
I have a definative memory of trying to gauge the money for a road trip with my girlfriend based on the gas prices.
It was about .79 a gallon at the time and based on how far we were going (Detroit to DC) it was cheaper to fly ( $125 maybe)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAaaawwwwwaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
When I use to date a handsome lad in NYC, the roundtrip airfare there was $88.
(and I remember when there was smoking on the flights. …cough cough…cough…and YAY for Northwest being the first airlines to have the cojones to ixnay the smoking on domestic flights!)
You kids settle down or I’ll hit you with my cane!
When I saw Elvis for the first time he was performing in a movie theater! It was his summer tour of 1956. Took my girlfriend with me. [sub]I was 13, she was 12.[/sub] Do the math.
We have a rotary phone that has a bad cord or we would be using it. It is a modern model that is set into the wall, therefore if we move it we will be left with a large hole in the wall.
Wait, wait - at 22 I may be the youngest person in the thread, but shouldn’t they at least have taken a history class at some point? Okay, the fact that my U.S. history classes covered events that you remember may be cold comfort, but there’s no excuse for not knowing those names.
Having just turned 22, when classes started this fall, I had the disconcerting experience of discovering that it seems everyone on campus is visibly younger than me. It was very strange to notice that.
I sometimes engage in a bit of time compression with the following formula:
event A is closer to event B than it is to today.
For example: the date of my birth in 1967 is closer to WWII than it is to today.
Or: the date of John Carter of Mars’s birth is much closer to the Spanish-American war than today. (Cane? What ca<WHACK!>)
I’m now deprived of my favorite taunt to my (Maine) coworkers. But until last year, it was, “Did you know that the last time the Red Sox won the world series is closer to the Civil War than it is to today?” Sigh…
