I'm listening to Spotify's Folk channel. These are the gentle acoustic songs of my childhood of the 1960s I didn't like then but I do now. Especially the Mamas and the Papas, their harmonies are gorgeous.
I've been thinking about the 1960s a lot lately. It was a terrible, crazy time. The death counts on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite, toting up the cost of Viet Nam War in bodies and blood. The hippies turning everything upside down. The assassinations, riots and chaos. It felt like the world was ending. Or out of control anyway.
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Entrance of the Drive In, showing screen, admissions office, and driveway.
HillTop Drive in, East Greenwich RI. It was a active drive-in for decades. These photographs were taken before the site was adapted for another use. Demolished 1999 Source |
On the upside, it was a thrilling time too. The NASA space shots. Watching a man land on the moon, get out of the spaceship, and walk around. I was amazed. Color television. Bar codes. Piling into the wayback of the station wagon with bunches of cousins and going to the Drive-In Movie Theater in our pjs. It was thrilling and all coming on so fast.
I remember the Kent Cinema, the two-screen theater in town next to where the kids would go get milk shakes at the creamery after the game. If you tried to go to an R-rated movie the ticket booth lady would holler at you. "I know your parents. I am calling them right now!"
Almacs where after you paid for your groceries the cashier would give the mom a placard with a black number on it. You went to the car and then drove up to the front of the grocery store, and the bag boy had taken your groceries and put them in a gray bin with a corresponding number to your placard, and placed the bin on a conveyor belt with rollers. The guy would push it through a flap like a large doggie door, and they rolled on the belt outside to the front of the store. You pulled up curbside and gave the placard to the guy. He'd load your groceries from the bin to your car. Once in a while he'd get the bins mixed up and we wouldn't notice the wrong groceries were in the car till we got home. The kids heard some swearing then, and the mom would have to go back and track down her real groceries.
Well love beads gave way to puka beads which gave way to mood rings then pet rocks and Tomagatchis and then I was grown up and didn't track fads anymore.
So all that is water under the bridge. In today's fast world I have deliberately slowed my life down. I want peace and quiet. And here it is-
I have 9.5 more days of school then I am out for the summer. I got my summer kitchen chair out and swapped it for the winter chair. I sit at the table in the kitchen and sip chilled herb tea and read and watch movies and study and write. I need a good chair due to the length of time I sit in it! That means taking the 100-year-old Bankers chair from the bedroom and putting it at the kitchen table. The Italian metal and wood chair I usually use during the year is good and comfortable, but is about 3/4 inch too high. My calf muscles get cramped.
I am going to resume studying quantum physics, make collages and hopefully some cloth covered books with the huge pile of good scraps my friend gave me, and take photos and post-process them in Pixlr. I am going to watch movies and good TV shows, like Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing and then double feature it with a re-viewing of Branagh's version from 20 years ago. There is a show called Eureka that is a sci-fi series about a town full of quantum physicist-genius types. I'll watch that, too.
I've got my books stacked up and ready to go, John Flavel's The Mystery of Providence, and Fatal Inquiry, #6 in the Barker and Llewellyn Victorian detective series by Will Thomas. And a few others, as well.
Here is some Boogie Woogie to enjoy. The music is outstanding and the dancers are amazing. The pianist is Silvan Zingg, he can speak many languages, (French, German, Italian, English, to name a few)is considered THE finest boogie woogie pianist alive today,and is a tremendous pianist of any genre. He founded the San Francisco International Boogie Woogie Festival.
