I always feel like I was born too late. I just know I should have been born early enough that I could have been around in the seventies.
I have been watching episodes of Swingtown, the CBS show about suburban life in the seventies. No, I don't wish I had been around to swing, but for all the other stuff in the seventies. Fondue and Farrah-hair and The Hustle. It looks like fun. I'll admit it, I have a secret passion for disco music. I like ABBA and the Bee Gees and Donna Summer. I just know that, had I been the right age, I would have been a dancing queen.
It's not just the seventies I would have enjoyed, I think. I would have liked to check out the forties and fifties too. I know, there was a huge war on, but people pulled together for a common cause, supported one another, worked together and eventually won and brought an era of prosperity that we will never see again. I so would have looked cute in a USO uniform too.
My interest in the past doesn't extend very far. Yes, I love Regency novels but I wouldn't want to live there in reality. No aspirin or penicillin, no running water, no electricity and let's face it, if you weren't in the rich elite, life probably wasn't too wonderful. I always think it's funny when people all think that in some past life they were Cleopatra or King Arthur or some other great figure. I'm pretty sure if I had ever had a past life, I was a serf or some other lowly type with a crappy life, serving someone with a better one. No thanks.
I don't think anyone will be pining to relive the years of my youth in the eighties. My mother loved the eighties because, as she says, nothing happened. She means nothing bad happened really, that it was just kind of an even keel time. But I think NOTHING happened. It was the yuppie time, when we watched The Cosby Show and did pretty much nothing else. Boring. No major social change, no uniting for a common cause, no blip on the radar. Dull, just a little wang chung-ing and some John Hughes films. (Okay, do you know how old I feel watching the JC Penney commercials that imitate the Breakfast Club?)
I'm sure the reality of the seventies probably wasn't as cool as it looked but I sure would have liked to see for myself. I would have had some cool clothes, feathered hair and danced the night away!
