Friday, November 29, 2013
Baby I Need Your Lovin'
I almost went with "Tracks of My Tears" instead, until I saw those dresses. That has got to be 1965 or 66. His hair tells me the earlier year is more likely.
It's 7th grade all over for me again. It's an interesting phenomenon of memory. I can tell you within a year or maybe two when something was in fashion from about 1965-72, even with the confounding factors that no girl at my school could have afforded a dress like that or dared to be that splashy; and that Manchester, NH was about a year behind the eastern cities in styles. (Which means a year ahead of Goffstown, where I live now.) But I couldn't come close to telling you what year in the 1980's and 90's something happened by looking at the clothes and the hair. Nor could I for anything prior to '65 - though of course some other clue might give me a guess.
In 1965 I started to care what was up-to-the-minute, and researched it wherever I went, though I didn't call it that. Somewhere in college that just faded. It perked up again for a year or two when my older sons hit 14 or 15, so that I can remember that Hootie and the Blowfish owned 1994.
My husband can see an aircraft or a tank for a quarter of a second in a movie or film clip and tell me instantly whether it was the right one for that year of that particular war. I used to think he was making it up.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy watching period movies: not historical dramas, which never get it right, but movies that capture a little piece of the culture of the year they were filmed in. I like to try to guess the year from the cars, clothes, hair, and cultural assumptions, particularly about whether women are recognizably human. I can do it only for the sixties and seventies, and to a limited extent for the eighties. After that I became an old fogey with only the most tenuous grasp of current culture--though cellphones, internet access, and airport security still provide pretty good clues from the nineties forward.