My Generation

I was sitting in class the other night, and my professor mentioned that, once upon a time, he had been a guest speaker on a panel with Bianca Jagger and Pat Robertson. My classmates, who are just barely old enough to no longer be considered fetuses, were all looking at each other with their tiny baby eyes, saying, “Wha? Who are they?” Which made me start thinking about all of the other things that people who are in their twenties don’t know about and don’t remember:

1. Pre-microwave days, when we had to make our soup, hot dogs and nachos the old-fashioned way. My family’s first microwave was seriously the size of a mini-fridge and it had a dial instead of a digital display. It probably gave out enough radiation that we should have worn those lead aprons, but instead, we would STAND IN FRONT OF IT WITH OUR FACES DIRECTLY ON THE GLASS and watch the cheese melt. No wonder my eyeballs keep falling out.
2. The nuances of Three’s Company, e.g., the vast differences between Mr. Roper and Mr. Furley. Roper = pervert, Furley = moron.
3. When the only video game we had to play was Pong, and we thought that was AWESOME.
4. Television without cable. And without remote controls. People are always like, “I don’t get it. Why was the last episode of M*A*S*H the most watched thing ever broadcast on television?” Because there was NOTHING ELSE ON! And boy, if you were still watching TV at midnight, they would play that star spangled banner while showing a picture of the flag, and then – poof – take away your TV just like that! Test patterns until 5 in the morning when some stern man came on TV and read news like he was disappointed that you kept such unusual hours.
5. Instead of watching TV, we had to go outside and play all the time. And our parents literally had no idea where we were. They figured we were probably safe, but they were too busy smoking cigarettes and drinking gin martinis and driving without seatbelts to get too bothered about it.
6. Going out to dinner, by the way, was a treat back then. If you were a girl, you had to wear a skirt or a dress, and if you were a man, you wore a suit jacket or at least a tie, even to Chi Chi’s, which was known as Quite A Nice Restaurant back in the day.
7. We considered it scandalous that Shirley Feeney was contemplating having sex with Carmine Ragusa, even though she was, like, 26, and they’d been dating for years.
8. On the other hand, we knew exactly what those Love Boat people were up to.
9. We did not have computers. Some of us didn’t even have electric typewriters for a while. We wrote things out on pencil and paper and didn’t sit there and bitch mightily about what a substantial hardship it was.
10. We also learned how to spell, and didn’t know that one day, we’d be able to completely avoid all responsibility by blaming spell check for our inability to spell hierarchy.
11. If we wanted some juice, we got a bag of oranges, and we made juice with our hand-operated juice maker. There were no such things as juice-boxes. Also: if we wanted water, we went to the tap, which was the only place we understood water to come from.
12. And let me tell you, when Capri Sun came out, it seriously blew our minds.
13. We had portable music, on something revolutionary called a Walkman. We thought it was so cool that we could go out and exercise, and only have to carry something that weighed about five pounds, was as bulky as a toaster, and ran out of battery juice somewhere around the second side of our awesome mix tape.
14. Some of us still accidentally refer to our iPod as our Walkman, and our children look at us the way we looked at our parents when they called the refrigerator the icebox.
15. We did not have answering machines, voice mail, or phones that moved at all. When you called someone, the rule was to let the phone ring eight times, and if they didn’t answer, you just hung up and went about your day. People were mysterious back then! The phone company actually OWNED our phones – we just rented them.
16. If you got a busy signal and you really needed to talk to your friend about the new mix tape you just made, however, you could do an emergency breakthrough. And no one prosecuted you for misuse of public utilities or anything.
17. We didn’t know about the Middle East, and we didn’t care. All we cared about was the Red Menace. If you don’t believe me, watch the 1984 Summer Olympics, where, instead of competing, the Russians were busy building a superhuman named Ivan Drago. First person who gets that reference without looking it up gets a dollar.* NO LOOKING IT UP.
18. All of our cars comfortably fit approximately 14 people: three on the bench seat up front, four in the middle, and seven in the trunk area, wheel wells, or sitting on peoples’ laps. We didn’t care back then. People were hanging out of cars like monkeys.
19. I can’t even talk to you about what the grocery store was like back then. All I have to say is “bottle return area.”
20. Most of all, back then, there were winners, and there were losers, none of this, “everyone gets a medal and we are all special.” We knew we weren’t special, that’s why we worked so hard. So when we got our chance to meet Bianca Jagger, or Pat Robertson, you’d better believe that we appreciated it.


* By “you will get a dollar,” I mean that you will get a dollar if I happen to see you and if I happen to have a dollar. Don’t expect miracles.