Buffalo Gal by Laura Pedersen
Author:Laura Pedersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2015-01-23T07:00:00+00:00
Seventeen
Everyone Was Groovy…Stardate 1965
In the seventies, both of my parents enjoyed a certain amount of popular music. Dad liked Simon and Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, and Harry Chapin. My father was a talented folksinger and often led rounds at our church, accompanying himself on guitar, and he also did sing-alongs with the Sunday school. These included a number of tunes written or popularized by fellow Unitarian Universalist Pete Seeger, such as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “If I Had a Hammer.”
Mom’s tastes ran more toward Don McClean’s “American Pie,” the Moody Blues, Bette Midler, and Fleetwood Mac. They both liked Neil Diamond. Neither of them listened to Barry Manilow.
The seventies were the heyday of the eight-track cassette player, terrariums, mood rings, fruit-striped gum, and the Big Wheel. Pet Rocks—a regular gray stone weighing about a quarter pound in a cardboard box with some straw in it—were launched in 1975 and immediately 1.5 million were sold. In 1976, red M&Ms were discontinued for eleven long years because the FDA banned Red Dye number two (even though M&Ms didn’t contain this dye). Fortunately, the candy maker left the green ones, which everyone knew worked as an aphrodisiac, or, in the parlance of the times, “made you horny.”
Speaking of mood enhancers, on winter weekends we often spent hours making candles, using everything from sand to ice cubes for
special effects. It’s hard to explain so many decades later, but it was a craze that swept the nation on the magnitude of the hula hoop in the late fifties and reality TV shows in more recent years.
Otherwise, girls made latch-hook rugs, beaded jewelry, and string art, while boys had ant farms, chemistry sets, and baseball cards. Girls who weren’t tomboys played the Mystery Date Game, wore Blue Jeans perfume, used “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific” shampoo, and accumulated Bonne Bell Lip Smackers in such tantalizing flavors as Good & Plenty, Tootsie Roll, Dr. Pepper, Hires Root Beer, 7-Up, Orange Crush, Bit-O-Honey, sour grapes, grape jelly, and sugar plum.
We all went ice-skating. And we all wore clogs, even throughout the winter.
Boys hung posters of sexy Farrah Fawcett from Charlie’s Angels in their bedrooms, while girls had their hair cut and blow-dried to resemble her famous feathered blond locks with flipped sides. Those of us who slaved over this look cannot deny it—the curling iron burn scars remain on our necks, ears, and foreheads. The less boy crazy of the girls wore their hair in a wedge like Dorothy Hamill’s, the 1976 Olympic gold-winning figure skater known as America’s sweetheart. In theory, this short and sassy bob was supposed to gracefully float upward when the girl spun around quickly, creating a halo effect, and was rigorously put to the test on playgrounds and skating rinks across the country. As to color, girls under eighteen did not tint or highlight their hair back then, except for temporary streaks of green, purple, or neon pink
created with Jell-O, which was sticky and would soon start to smell (and not necessarily like the flavor we’d used).
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