Living That Seventies Show

The other night, my son came around asking for relics from the Seventies. He was looking for tie-dyed shirts and bell bottom pants, records, the kinds of things he had seen on That Seventies Show.

What did I still have from way back then? I’d outgrown my Earth shoes in more ways than one. In the basement, I did have a vintage polyester pants suit my mother handed down to me in 1987 to wear to special events. Did he want to see my first pair of wire-rimmed glasses? I started rummaging through things to see what I could find, listing events as I went to help him get a history lesson out of his quest.

“Don’t forget the Vietnam War,” my husband called out as I began reciting.

“Do you want to see a poem about the war?” I asked Guy. “I have some poems.”

“No, thanks,” he said politely. “That’s okay.”

Foraging for something a little more exciting, I found a black and white photograph of me with my three brothers, all of us attired in Seventies clothes, the hair on the boys a little shaggy and my hair long, parted in the middle just like Donna’s on TV. Then I remembered an old diary, an authentic primary source, and pulled it out.

"We tryed [sic] out for parts in Antigone today. I wish I was louder when I’m doing something like that. I must’ve been terrible!”

I probably was, but I was worse when I got the part of Eurydice and the messenger forgot to tell me Haemon had killed himself so it didn’t really make a lot of sense to the students in the audience when I committed suicide in despair.

“I went to the library and got three books on Oscar Wilde.”

Well, there wasn’t a lot of excitement there, except for some secrets I wasn’t ready to share. Then I spotted an old recording my brother Charles made in 1971 of our classic family radio show, WXYZ. Now that was a relic! I put it on and turned the volume up high.

“Ask me any questions,” I said to my son. “I can explain things.”

Throughout the recording was witty banter from Charles, the main deejay, who touched on miscellaneous events in the news as the rest of us played different roles. An interview with a forgetful old lady, played by yours truly, gave insight into a new food tax and adolescent humor. My favorite segment was when John and I did a hilarious parody of a shampoo commercial for “Protein 24,” a take-off which ended with an appeal in a voice I had at 15: “Now, girls, don’t sing the frizzy blues.”

We were funny, I had to admit, flip-flopping from slapstick to satire and back again. Between scratchy performances of Paul McCartney’s “Lovely Linda” and Blood, Sweat and Tears with “And When I Die,” albeit from 1969, we sounded so clever, if I do say so myself. Maybe a little too clever for a sixth grader’s ears?

“He’s not drunk!” I noted when Graeme, 11, started hiccupping. “He’s just pretending to be an inebriated deejay, an incongruity that would never happen in real life. Incongruity is an element of humor.”

“I know, Mom,” my son said.

“That’s satire!” I called when John, 16, started a campaign ad for George Wallace while I played “America” on the piano. “You know, satire, it means he was really criticizing white supremacy, not promoting it. George Wallace was a famous racist who ran for president.”

“I know, Mom,” my son said.

When John started mocking people who wanted to shut down “hippy radio stations,” joking about fire-bombing hippy establishments in a manner no high school student would be free to do today, neither on air nor in print, I had to interrupt again.

“He doesn’t mean that,” I yelled over the melodious voice of this forensics team member who would join the Navy one day soon. “It’s a farce, you know, he’s making fun of people who hate hippies. Some people didn’t like hippies or their music back then."

“I know, Mom,” my son said.

When the radio show stopped, Charles at 14 having succeeded in recording a great night of family fun, my son started singing Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

“Where did you learn that?” I asked him, amazed he could sing a song that kept us mystified for months in 1971. That Seventies Show. I remember where I was the first time I heard “American Pie,” Piggly Wiggly. I saw him live, too, you know, Don McLean. I was there, in person, a member of the original cast of the Seventies. He broke a string at Township Auditorium and kept playing.

I have a good memory. When I have grandchildren, I’ll still be able to reminisce for hours about popular culture before I call in Grandpa to talk about the Vietnam War.

Felicia Mitchell First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 23 July 2003, p. A4-A5. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2003.

A Mid-Life Summer's Whimsy

Lately I have been thinking about my march toward fifty. Do I want to hear a drum roll, violins, or a bluebird whispering in my ear? I think I’ll go for the bluebird.

Do you know how the bluebird got its color? A Cherokee legend says that the bluebird was so awed by the beauty of a blue lake that it dipped in and out of it for five days, turning from white to blue on the last day. That same legend explains why the coyote is mud colored. While the bluebird was drawn to the natural beauty of the lake, the coyote was vain. Thinking it would look great in blue, it coveted the color of the bluebird. Focusing on appearances, the coyote got distracted and fell into a muddy ditch instead of the lake.

My own hair is now muddy instead of golden, muddy blonde with white streaks. Age, like that ditch the coyote fell in, has a way of teaching you not to be vain about crowning glories. I have to admit that I like watching my hair slowly turn white. A Creek saying alleges that white hair indicates the creator is whispering in your ear of the afterlife. My mother’s hair turned completely white the year she watched her first child, my brother John, pass over. He was twenty-one.

It’s very sad when somebody young dies. I have been blessed with a longer life, a life marked by a will to accomplish some of the things my brother wanted. I haven’t been to Paris yet, but I’ve seen a lot of the world, and Washington County, and I’ve had a chance to marry. The happiest event of my life, the birth of my son Guy, has helped me to reclaim some of the innocence I lost watching my brother suffer and die.

My son is a freckle-faced boy. Watching him grow and accumulate more freckles, I have come to trust life all over again. Philosophically speaking, his freckles represent the innocence of my own freckle-faced childhood when I marveled at life, like a beautiful blue lake, before me. They’re also cute. Did you know that if you wash your face in the wheat dew of May, you can wash your freckles off? If you don’t live near a wheat field, you can snip off the appendages at the base of dandelion leaves and soak them in alcohol to make an astringent. Short of that, you can buy some potion at the store. The world is as full of cures for freckles as it is mud.

An Irish legend has it that freckles are left by fairies who bless you. Genetically speaking, freckles are a dominant trait. One could say that my son has freckles because of Irish forebears, not fairies. Because my mother has had such a time with skin cancer, I wore sunscreen so long that I lost touch with my freckles. Sure, there were age spots to compensate, but that’s not the same. When I looked into a mirror, I saw a woman of a certain age. I was glad to be living a long life, but did I have to get old? Some women, and men, look into the mirror and decide to dye their hair. Others start saving for BOTOX® injections. I wanted freckles.

I wasn’t like the coyote, mind you. I didn’t want freckles out of vanity so I’d be cute like my son. Like the bluebird that gazed into the lake and wanted to wear its beauty, I gazed into my son’s face and wanted to wear his joie de vivre. So one morning I got up and just didn’t use sunscreen, and I had a lot of sunscreen not to use: sunscreen with moisturizers, tinted sunscreen, non-chemical sunscreen, high SPF sunscreen, even night cream with sunscreen. I quit powdering my face too. Why spend so much time hiding my partially Irish face from fairies?

The first night, after a day spent outside, saw progress. Four days later, I happened to glance in the mirror. There were more! Within a few weeks, some freckles returned—not the whole face-load, but enough to remind me of the little girl grinning behind the adult face. I wasn’t so old after all. Until my freckles fade, because I’m sensible enough to be wearing sunscreen again, I will enjoy my reunion with every one of them. I won’t even mash wild strawberries from the yard to hasten their departure.

In fact, if I begin to follow the advice of nutritionists who suggest ageing adults get more sun to benefit their skeletal systems, they may not fade so quickly. Sitting in the sun unprotected for five minutes now and then does seem to liberate my old joie de vivre. It could be Vitamin D, or it could be that outside I’m forced to look away from my mirror into a marvelous world unfolding, like a beautiful blue lake, before me.

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 16 July 2003, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2003.