Neato Frito Machito!

So, now that I'm doomed to evenings on the couch, I find myself addicted to VH1's I Love the '70s show. While I can't stay up late enough to watch both episodes (as I could have in the '70s, if only my parents would have let me), I find that the ones I have seen transport me back to my days as a South Miami kid, when Morgan Freeman was best known as Easy Reader and I knew that as a woman I could bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never, never let you forget you're a man (although the show hasn't shown that commercial, it's deeply imprinted into my brain as representative of all things 1970s).

Of course, while this show brings back many childhood memories for me, it only reinforces the fact that Adam is almost five years younger than me. "Remember the bicentennial?" I asked him. Nope, not a memory of it. And why should he? He was only four and a half. But I remember it. I remember collecting the bicentennial quarters. I remember going to watch the fireworks on a small hill in a park by a high school, and my sister crying and crying and crying because the fireworks were so loud (I also remember that the bathroom stalls had no doors and making my mother try to block me from view. I didn't understand why there were no doors at the time and in retrospect realize that Miami, even in the '70s, had crappy scary high schools). I remember the patriotic cover my elementary school yearbook had that year. Adam claims I couldn't have that many memories of the '70s, but he's wrong: those were many of my formative years. So, in what will be one of my more self-indulgent posts, here are some of my strongest memories of the 1970s:

• My mother explaining to me why Anita Bryant was a bad person and what "homosexual" meant and why it was okay for my school teachers to be "homosexual."
  
• My allowance didn't cover the entire price of a Mad Magazine, which was 50 cents (my allowance was a quarter). By the time the monthly magazine came out, I wouldn't have been able to save the whole 50 cents. My father would give me my allowance on a Friday, and then we'd go to the newsstand in the next morning, and I'd spend my allowance generally on a Richie Rich or an Archie comic book or a candy bar. However, my father, a closet Mad Magazine reader himself, would generally take pity on me and kick in the extra quarter for the magazine (and eventually the extra 35 cents when they raised the price to 60 cents).
  
• Geoff, my best friend Charlotte's older brother, explaining to us why it was so shocking for Eric Clapton to be singing "Cocaine" on television and what, exactly, cocaine was.
  
• "Oh no!" "No Coke, Pepsi" Noogie-patrol. "Baseball been a berry berry good to me." "Candygram." "And she had a teeny tiny drop of sweat on the tip of her nose and I wanted to say, 'Hey, Barbara, knock that drop of sweat off your nose!'" "Jane, you ignorant slut." "Never mind." The Bass-o-Matic.
  
• Finally getting a Little House on the Prairie skirt in a lovely shade of peach.
  
• Being forced to sit through "Black Dog" before my dad's 8-track of Led Zeppelin IV would get to "Stairway to Heaven."
  
• Buying my first 45 record--"Run Joey Run".
  
• My mother trying to explain the Watergate trials to me, but my being infinitely more interested in The Six-Million Dollar Man (which actually came on Sunday nights past my bedtime, but I was my father's excuse to watch the show so I was allowed to stay up late to see it. At the end of each episode, he'd say, "Time for bed," and I'd say, "Scenes, scenes, scenes!" and I'd be allowed to stay up just a few minutes longer to see the scenes for the next episode).
  
• My mother explaining (she did a lot of explaining to me in those days) what those words written on the bathroom walls of her school meant (she was getting her fine arts degree at the University of Miami in those days), and why it was okay to say those words--there was no such thing as a "bad" word--(and she did--and still does--say them frequently) but not at school and not in front of my grandparents.
  
• Not even having the concept of a seat belt in my dad's MG convertible as the Tweedle Twirp and I sat on the back perch when the top was down and yelled, "Fast around the corners! Fast around the corners!" as my dad screeched around the corners making my sister and I shriek.
  
• Wanting to be Anne of Green Gables; wearing tinted glasses with my initials in gold in the corner of the lens; "Mother, please, I'd rather do it myself!"; safety being the orange flag my mother made me put on my bicycle; my first crush--on Donny Osmond; "And they told two friends and they told two friends"; my father's misguided mustache; the orange and brown stripes my mother painted in our hallway; seeing Grease five times in the theater but having no idea what the line "she's a real pussy wagon" in the song "Greased Lightnin'" meant; wanting to go over to Cindy's house because she had her own princess phone, a waterbed, and Pong; "Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, all on a sesame seed bun"; and my father taking me to see Saturday Night Fever because he thought it was a good movie and an important movie for me to see, but making me swear that I wouldn't tell my sister that we went, because she was still too young for it.