First, I faced the mammographer taking my medical history. Ever used hormonal contraceptives? "Yeah, a couple years back in the Seventies. It was the Seventies...What can I say?" An hour later I'm talking with bubbly young girl who is cutting hair and discussing bad hair decisions. Here I confess a series of bad salon perms. "It was the Seventies...What can I say?" How many more bad I ideas can I blame on a decade? My whole life? OK, they weren't all bad decisions. But, I can draw a direct line for most of my joys and woes back to the Seventies.
The Seventies weren't all that great. Not epic in the way people speak of the Sixties. (I could hardly stand to watch "That Seventies Show". It was funny for a a limited number of episodes and then dwindled off. Perhaps the first good episodes were a little too reminiscent of real teenage years in Wisconsin in the Seventies.) There was a lot of polyester. I wore polyester!!! ("It was the Seventies...What can I say?") Hair styles were goofy. The music was good; even disco at least managed to get people up off their derrieres. That was when I grew up. In 1971 I was a clueless, geeky sixteen year old. By 1980, I was a married woman with one and a half children. In ten years I had managed to get out of high school with minimal effort, went to college, dropped out of college, dropped back in to college, found some bad romances, got a degree in art history and religious studies, found a husband, planned a wedding, got married, decorated my first apartment, had my first baby, conceived another....and I can't forget seeing Springsteen at the Uptown Theater in 1976.
That was the decade that laid the foundation for the rest of my life. I'm going to accept it for what it was. (yes, there is some disco on my Spotify playlist; I didn't understand the motivation for Fifties nostalgia back in the Seventies - now I do) But quit using it as an excuse.
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| Bad perms. |
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