Caught Between Woodstock and Wall Street

"Does he really think that's attractive?"

Yep. I said it. And no sooner had I uttered the comment than the truth hit me. I had turned into my parents.

In this dodge-ball game we call "life in America," some things sneak up on you. And one day, you realize they've been hanging around for a while, and they've laid claim to a piece of your life and your lifestyle. Other things seem to just suddenly spirit in one morning and then won't leave. They don't grow on you, they bolt onto you.

I'm not sure which is worse. Doesn't matter. You're stuck with them. And now you've crossed that generational Rubicon. You've become your parents.

"Does he really think that's attractive?"

It was at the grocery when it happened. I saw a guy with piercings. I don't mean a few ear-studs, vertically stacked like coliseum concert amps. I mean bulk piercings, as if the guy had found some obscure precious metals tax loophole that guaranteed him cash rebates by the ounce. For a minute, I thought his face was some kind of interactive Connect-The-Dots game, provided by the grocers as a kiddie diversion. The guy looked like an android was trying to escape his head.

Things sure were different, back when my generation was changing the world.

I'm not exactly sure how our culture chronologically defines the term, but I grew up in what is fondly referred to as "back in the day." And back in the day, just like now, kids got bored. But not that bored. I never got so ennui-smacked as to suggest, "Hey, Billy! Let's go drill some holes in our heads!"

In fact, on the Radical-Fashion-Meter, we were unbelievably tame, though we thought differently at the time. In our imaginations, we were fringe. We were haute couture, with fangs. We were OUT there!

Here's how totally out-of-control we were, back in the day. We wore...are you ready?...we wore denim. In public! We wore denim jeans, which, at the time, was something that polite people changed OUT of before they presented themselves to civilized society.

It gets worse.

We wore denim jeans with - now, hang on to something - with flared legs. These were called "bell-bottoms." Back in the day, bell-bottoms were radical to the point of heresy, and virtually guaranteed my generation a no-waiting, laminated uber-pass to Perdition itself.

To further impede the efforts of Big Bad Authority, some of us even bought pre-damaged denim: jeans intentionally marred with rips and holes and stains. Clever, huh? That'll show the "establishment," eh?

We wanted to rebel, we really did. We wanted to be outraged. We so desperately wanted our own cause. But then came the bad news: life was good. We didn't have the Viet Cong; we had Donkey Kong. We didn't have animus; we had an allowance.

What do you do, when you want to be bitter, and life doesn't suck?

We wore tie-dyed shirts (look it up). We wore insanely wide ties, often stamped with the American flag, or the head of Che Guevara. We painstakingly styled haircuts called the "mullet." No, naming a haircut after a flat fish didn't make sense. That was the point. I think.

In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that there's an extant 1970's photograph of me and a date, posing for the obligatory parental pre-prom photo. My date was gorgeous, and sane. I, on the other hand, showed up with the hair of a medieval barber. I looked like an electrocuted yak.

It gets worse.

I was sporting a bow-tie so broad that it had its own zip code. The Navy could've used it to launch an F-16. And I shamelessly appeared in a wide-lapel tuxedo, in a shade of pastel blue rarely found in even the most generous Crayon collection.

It gets worse.

It was a velour tuxedo.

For those of you under the age of 40, velour was a substance once substituted for actual clothing. It was a synthetic fabric with the texture of deep-pile carpet, all the class of a intestinal malfunction joke told in church, and the resale value of a half-empty Chernobyl sour cream container. But don't take my word for it; here's scientific proof. Only two man-made objects are visible from outer space: the Great Wall of China and robin's-egg-blue velour tuxedos.

"Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness." So advised the Chinese warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu, over 20 centuries ago, in "The Art of War." And though I'm not up-to-speed on the importance of the senior prom in ancient Chinese history, I'm fairly certain they would have frowned upon outfitting their dynastic storm troopers in pale blue velour. (We'll discuss yak-like hairstyles some other time.)

Sadly, my generation had no such restrictive sense of shame. Apparently, we just wore stuff, simply because it was stuff nobody else had ever thought to wear.

And I won't even get into something we used to call "leisure suits." That would just be cruel. Some of you might be trying to eat.

But we were rebelling, and we were immortal. We thought we were that thing that was the best of all possible things: cool.

But then we went postal. We went bat-barking insane. I don't remember how it started; who thought of it first. Maybe it was Che Guevara. But it was an act of rebellion never imagined by history's most wild-eyed and restless, and it nearly undid several thousand years of social and cultural progress.

We, the fine young men of America, started parting our hair down the middle. Honestly. We did.

Did we really think that was attractive?

Forgive us, one day, if you can.

And then, while you're in that gentle mood, forgive us for disco, too.