When I was in my twenties, effective flirtation was accomplished by going bra-less under a loose tee shirt. Today’s teen and twenty year olds wear Wonder Bras that squash their breasts together to create uplift and cleavage and cover (I use the term loosely) this with tight fitting spaghetti strapped tanks, cut low on top and hemmed above the midsection. Flirtatious nonchalance is portrayed by allowing brightly colored bra straps to escape the tank’s shoulder straps. Thank you Madonna!
But I shouldn’t be critical. My own adolescence was inexorably shaped by the media which had then just begun to infiltrate living rooms and inform a generation labeled Baby Boomers. Television shaped our family life: as a child I watched ‘Sing Along With Mitch’ with my Dad, who was an avid fan of the goateed minstrel. I was just glad to sit beside him, a misguided early attempt at "face time" – it missed the mark.
During our potty-humored grade school years, Dad returned the favor, joining my brothers and me watching Saturday movie matinees on tv. The horror show host called himself Ghoulardi, spawned an esoteric vocabulary of insults (“You Purple Knif!”) and gained notoriety by exploding a cherry bomb in a (toy?) mouse.
A little bit later, my whole family came together as we all sat mesmerized by the Beatles’ performances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Screaming British adolescents told us this was a Phenomenon to be followed. Later it was Laugh-In and Dick and Tommy Smothers of the inane Smothers Brothers Show.
Printed media were more personally transformative. In Junior High I spent many snowy winter weekends staring again and again at the faces and fingers, sweaty muscles and bloody births depicted in the Time-Life photo collection titled The Family of Man. With soft pencil and stiff white drawing paper I’d try to enter their lives by reproducing their expressions, their miraculously real bodies. The photographs’ depiction of Everyman intrigued me and made me curious about a world beyond my experience.
In High School I didn’t know myself apart from Time magazine articles about rebellious youth. I became one of the legions of suburban teens snubbing their noses at their parents’ hard-fought affluence and creating their own ‘counter-culture’. I read the magazine as if it were a National Geographic expose on an exotic culture I wanted to join, and dutifully followed its guidance. My traveling clothes were multi-patched blue jeans, tie-dyed shirts, love beads and long straight hair parted in the middle.
My father was far slower in "going with the flow." I still remember the birthday when we gave him a light blue oxford shirt to vary his rigid business attire of white shirt, navy or red tie, and dark suit. He was genuinely squeamish about trying it on and had to be persuaded by his daughters’ insistent flattery. We’d never have gotten him to wear the also popular pink oxford. He was similarly squeamish about my donning of hippie apparel.
The aural media were influential as well. Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Crosby, Stills and Nash formed my incipient record collection. Several of my friends strummed acoustic guitars and mimicked Bob Dylan if they were male, Judy Collins if female. ‘Lay Lady Lay’ portended a sweet, mysterious and appealing image of sexuality to my virgin’s ears. Much later the banal radio hit ‘No Tell Lover’ accompanied a less idealistic period of ”swinging singles”-hood.
Missing so far from this reminiscence is that fact that I spent a lot of my youth and young adulthood essentially alone, finding comfort in writing and drawing, even more than in the afore-mentioned media munching. Looking back, my forays into the popular culture of my day had little staying power. Drinking Ripple wine and smoking marijuana in high school, moving on to cigarettes in college were ways of making friends rather than expressing the “real” Me.
While unconsciously caught up in the zeitgeist of the time, I married at twenty, proud to be fashionably poor but also hoping to convince my parents of my maturity and independence. I veered from the popular path of dropping- out and tuning-in only in remaining serious about my college education. In '78, a little before the height of the country’s Women’s-Movement-inspired divorce trend, my marriage was officially dissolved. He was a romantic, who had taken the ‘make love not war’ messages of the day a little too literally and liberally.
Today I shun television, get my news exclusively from newspapers and National Public Radio, read mostly non-fiction, prefer classical music and enjoy face to face conversation much more than telephone, though I admit to hiding behind electronic messaging when my natural shyness precludes more direct sociability.
I find all the diversion I need in my garden, in long walks with my dog and cuddles with my cats. I find authenticity, challenge and rewards in my (second) marriage, and in mothering my daughter –whose fascination with her own culture focuses currently on "cool" clothes, her friends, and sports.
Does my self-imposed media abstention render me blissfully ignorant or hopelessly "out of it"? Most definitely both. Would I want it any other way? Not! That’s not what’s happenin,’ Baby.
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