1971

I was inspired to write this after reading 21 Proms, a collection of short stories by various authors, on the agonies and ecstasies of the great American high school dance tradition.


It was the year that CBS debuted All In The Family. No one had ever seen a show like that. Ever. History-making, it broke ground for putting the outrageous in front of millions to see and hear.  Although AITF was highly acclaimed, in the forty-some odd years since, we have become increasingly numbed to doses of in-your-face script, mindless antics and tasteless commentary emanating from TV-Land. Now we have to put up with the likes of the Kardashians, South Park, Skins, Honey Boo Boo and on and on. Though I watched and sang 'Those Were the Days' along with Archie and Edith (Boy, the way Glenn Miller played, songs that made the Hit Parade, gee our old LaSalle ran great, those were the days...), ultimately I blame All In The Family/CBS for the eventual numbing of our culture's sensibilities. (Yes, I realize I don't have to watch trash TV.  I don't.  Much.)

1971: Viet Nam; Charles Manson and his followers are sentenced to death (only to have the sentence commuted to life in '72 by the state of CA); 500,000 people descend on D.C. to protest our involvement in the Viet Nam war; the U.S. ends its trade embargo of China; cigarette advertisements (TV and radio) are banned in the U.S.; Apollo 14 lifts off and our astronauts head for the moon for the 3rd time; NASDAQ comes into being; the 'Fight of the Century' (Frazier vs. Ali); the Ed Sullivan show comes to a halt after 23 years on CBS; Amtrak is born; Nixon declares war on drugs; the voting age is lowered to 18; Attica prison riots claim 42 lives; Disney World opens; the United Arab Emirates are founded.

1971:  Fashions include platform shoes, Charlie Brown shoes, Bass Weejuns; bell-bottom pants, hip-huggers, frayed jeans; tie-dyed shirts, peasant blouses; hot pants, mini-, midi-, and maxi-skirts; teased up poufs, gigantic Afros or long hippie hair, comma curls & pageboys; love beads, pale frosty lipstick, blue eyeshadow and winged eyeliner. What goes around comes around!

1971: Led Zeppelin, Three Dog Night, The Who, Marvin Gaye, David Bowie, The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, John Lennon, and Yes were the great bands/musicians of the time.  Joy To The World (3DN), I Feel The Earth Move (Carole King), How Can You Mend A Broken Heart (BeeGees), One Bad Apple (Osmonds), Take Me Home, Country Roads (John Denver), Me and Bobby McGee (Janis Joplin), Ain't No Sunshine (Bill Withers) and more incredible music that still plays in my heart and head.

1971:  A Clockwork Orange, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dirty Harry, Diamonds are Forever, Straw Dogs, Harold and Maude, The French Connection, Shaft, The Last Picture Show, Fiddler on the Roof, The Andromeda Strain, Play Misty for Me, Summer of '42, Klute, Carnal Knowledge, Panic in Needles Park, McCabe and Mrs. Miller were some of the movies that year.

1971:  We read Go Ask Alice, The Day of the Jackal, The Winds of War, Nemesis, The Dragonriders of Pern, The Other, Rabbit Redux, The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Penmarric...on and on.

1971:  Coco Chanel, James Cash Penney (JC Penney), Harold Lloyd, Pope Cyril VI, Ogden Nash, Audie Murphy, the crew of the Soyuz 11, Jim Morrison, Louis Armstrong, John Jacob Astor,  and Nikita Khrushchev are a few of the famed who departed earth that year.

1971: Among millions of others, Taye Diggs, Kid Rock, Sean Astin, Tupac Shakur, Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, Pete Sampras, Stella McCartney, Amy Poehler, Lance Armstrong, Jada Pinkett Smith, Snoop Dogg, Wynona Ryder, Christina Applegate, Ricky Martin, and Mary J. Blige are born. God, that makes me feel so old!

Hopefully, this mini-compendium of the events and culture of 1971 paints a fair picture of the times.  That was the year I graduated high school and was lucky to do so.  An indifferent student, I squeaked by:  #60 in a class of 180. If that doesn't proclaim my mediocrity, I'm not sure what would.  Though, to this day, I recall the school guidance counselor taking me out of class one afternoon to inform me of my IQ test results.  (Yes, we still took those back then and they actually meant something)  I'd scored 130.  I had no idea if that was good or bad.  I figured 'bad', since that's pretty much how most of my tests came out. She looked at me so quizzically, studying my face intently.  It was as though she thought me an alien that had just crawled out of a spaceship and taken up residence in the school.  Well, given my barely average to poor grades, I'm sure she probably was wondering who really took that test for me.  But it was me, I promise.

Here's a surprise for those of you under, say, the age of 45:  your generation did not invent teen angst. Neither did mine, but we sure thought we did.  Just as every generation does. The senior class of '71 had all the requisite class distinctions well in hand, too.  We had our In Crowd, Athletes and Prom Queens, Nerds, Geeks, Dweebs, Twerps and Dorks, just like every other class in this country for the last bazillion years.  On reflection, I was a Dweeb but didn't know it at the time, of course. All I knew was that I was not cool.

If you were or are a Dweeb, you know the crippling social anxiety that shrouds your existence in high school. And I was shy and chubby, to boot.  What a one-two punch of loserdom! In case you don't know exactly the difference between Dweebs and Dorks or Geeks and Nerds, check this out:

http://laughingsquid.com/nerd-venn-diagram-geek-dork-or-dweeb/

Oh, how my vulnerable teen-age heart suffered from the age of 13 on!  But, at last I was a senior and this torture called high school would soon be over, never to be endured again.  I never had a single date in high school. Never had a boyfriend. No one tried to walk this porky, dorky Dweeb to class or carry my books.  Never had that first kiss (till years later) and I was glad sixteen was behind me because there was nothing sweet about it at all. I was such a loser, I flunked Driver's Ed and couldn't even drive a car!  Boys terrified me.  But I longed desperately for romance just the same.  I had a violent crush, in my senior year, on a skinny guy with a beaky nose who was in my choir class. He was sorta nerdy/geeky.  Smart and arty, Matt was not exactly one of the In Crowd. However, I thought he was pretty cool and very funny and I have such a weak spot for witty guys. My dear friend, Janie, knew of the secret torch I carried for him.

Imagine my mingled horror and delight, when one day in mid-May, she rushed up to me in Home Ec class. "Matt is going to ask you to the Prom!" she hissed at me. Dumbfounded, I stared at her in silence, not able to take in what she'd just said. "What?! How?  How do you know?" I asked her. "Because I just talked to him about it and he said he would ask you!" she told me. Oh, dear God, I thought, how perfectly embarrassing. My girlfriend had to arrange a pity date to the prom for me!  I wanted to die.  But there was nothing to be done about it.  Besides, it would be a dream come true! Matt, my secret crush, taking me to the prom!  The dance was in only a few days. I had way less than a week to tell my mother and come up with a suitable dress for this gig.

That was hard enough in itself.  My mother was a different species of human altogether.  A man-hater to the core, she had harped and warned and threatened me off boys ever since I'd had my first menstrual period.  I was sooo scared to tell her; afraid she'd go off the deep end this time for sure. But, astonishingly, she took it with great equanimity.  Maybe she thought it was some kind of rite of passage, who knows.

It was considered kind of cool to make your own prom dress in the early 70's.  Only rich girls got fancy, 'real', new prom dresses.  The rest of us wore hand-me-downs or we made them. The home-made dresses had a boho-chic look (except we'd never heard that term back then).  Kind of gypsy meets nature-girl meets flower child, you know what I mean?  So, off to the fabric store we went, my mom and I.  I settled on a pattern of a full-length, empire-waisted dress with long bell sleeves and a scoop neck with a ribbon sash at the high waist, tied in the back.  Very Laura Ashley-ish.  The fabric selected was navy blue dotted swiss.  Soon we had the material spread over the floor and the pieces all cut out. Mom would supervise this operation, but I was going to sew the darn thing myself.  For the next two nights, I raced home from school and feverishly sewed.  I got the sleeves done, got the skirt done, got the bodice done.  I even got the zipper in it. Only needed to finish the interfacings and hem it.  I hoped and prayed that it didn't make me look like a big, fat sausage tied in the middle. I fantasized that this dress would transform me from Dumpy Debbie Dweeble to something akin to Cheryl Tiegs and everyone would be stunned by the miraculous and magical change.  I wanted to be Cinderella so damn bad.

But I was sweating bullets.  Two and a half days had passed since Janie had told me Matt was going to ask me to the prom.  Those days passed in a blur as I agonized how I'd respond and not seem like an idiot.  Keep in mind that girls did not ask guys out in those days.  Finally, it was Friday, the day of the prom.   There sure wasn't much time left for him to get together with me and finalize the plans for tonight.  What on earth was Matt thinking to leave everything to the last minute like this? He didn't even know where I lived; I needed to get him directions to my house so he could pick me up on time.  First period, second period, then lunch came and went.  The rest of the afternoon tick-tocked away. By my last class, reality waltzed up and slapped me roundly about the head and shoulders.  He wasn't going to ask me to the prom.  Oh. God.  How perfectly humiliating.

At 3:00, the final bell rang and everyone rushed to get the heck out of school for the day.  I plodded out to the bus like a zombie, unaware of anyone else around me. I rode home feeling like a burn victim, staring blankly into the distant horizon.  Numb to the world, I wanted to die, melt into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy threw the bucket of water on her, fade into nothing like a spent firework, whirl down the drain like old bathwater.  But I did not cry.  I resolved not to shed a single tear and that I'd never mention it again.  But, I was so very, very hurt. I felt more gauche and dorky than ever. Thankfully, a couple of weeks later we graduated and I relegated the ignominious, prom-less incident to the past, never to be trotted out, revisited or aired in public again.  Till now.

Happily, I eventually grew out of my adolescent afflictions and into a better-than-just-mediocre woman. During my twenties and thirties, I was relatively slim and turned out to be a fairly decent-looking girl who is reasonably funny and rather artistic. Now retired (and no longer slim), I've had a successful career and garnered plenty of accolades for my work and abilities. Have attended many formal events that make high school prom look...well, high school-y and prom-ish. My husband loves me dearly and must have thought I was a great prize once upon a time.  Maybe he still does!

And all I can say about 1971 now is, 'Matt, you really stepped on it, Dude. You'll never know what you missed.'


Till next time!

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain