79: Stuck in the Wrong Decade
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I was talking to a guy at a party, an older man, and this guy's opinionated and very charming, and we're talking about politics, and the guy gets on the DC Communist, an actual member of the actual Communist Party. So how's it going? I ask him, the cause of world communism, and he talks about the media not giving communism a fair shake, and he pulls out a pamphlet that he gives me for some talk that a fellow traveler is giving. I ask him about the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc, didn't put a damper on the whole worldwide movement, and he said what communists have been saying for decades, really, that the Soviet Union's not real communism, that no one's tried real communism, the way that it's supposed to be tried. And suddenly I felt like I was talking to a time traveler, to somebody from whom the last few decades had not occurred, or simply didn't matter. Marcel Elfold spent years making movies about Nazis, the sorrow and the pity memory of justice. His family was Jewish, escaped Germany before the war. "What's it like spending so much time interviewing Nazis?" he was asked once. "Oh, I get along with Nazis," he said. "We share something in common, an interest in the past. I share more with them than I do with most people today, who don't care about the past." Nearly a decade ago, I had a chance to interview the members of a band called Camper Van Beethoven. At that time, they were one of my favorite bands, but I sort of blew my interview with them, because I misunderstood them and their music so grossly. I was out of touch. I will just say that right now, they were playing a kind of country folk mixed with surfer music, mixed with the sort of fake Egyptian Russian music, whatever else kind of came to mind, scah. They openly sang about drug use. And this was before our culture, before we as a people had coined the words slacker or gen X. And I spent a lot of that interview alienating the guys in this band by asking were they hippies? Were they modern day hippies? That was the only phrase I had in my head to refer to what I was seeing. I thought they were stuck in the wrong decade. But in fact, they were just carrying a few props from another decade into the present, which is in fact what I think we all do. Walk down Michigan Avenue or State Street or Wabash here in Chicago and you'll see older guys in wide brim hats from the 50s coming out of the off-track betting. They're the art institute students, dressed in that fake 70s thing we've been suffering through as a nation for the last three years. We all carry pieces of the past. Some of us more than others, which brings us to today's radio program. From W.B. E.C. Chicago and Public Radio International, it is this American life and our glass. Today on our program, people stuck in another decade. At one, the wedding game, two people who love 1970s television and how it affects their engagement and their wedding. Act two, stuck as a teenager. Two people who get suspended in time as adolescents for very different reasons. Act three, Pervwalk. Two smart, funny 90s men who have no problem working with women or seeing women as their equals. And why? They spend 10 minutes a day walking around scoping women and talking about them like they were Jack Lyman in some 1950s movie. Act four, working in another decade, in which our intrepid correspondent takes a job at Mount Vernon, George Washington's plantation home, doing a job they politely call Field Hand. Act five, nostalgia, the final frontier. Someone who was stuck in a decade that is as far back as you can possibly go. Back in the day, before back in the day, the day when all matter in the universe existed in a single point in space. You remember then, stay with us. Act one, the winning game. One common way, perhaps the most common way these days, that people get stuck in other decades is that they get stuck in the TV shows of other decades. Consider please this extreme case example. Carl began his life with the normal excessive relationship that most of us have with television. As a child, he watched six or seven hours a day. Wendy, went even further. She actually watched TV to see herself. As a kid growing up in Chicago, she appeared in commercials that were shot here for McDonald's, for Sears, for Kellogg's. She was even in a Morris the cat commercial. Wendy knows Morris the cat. I worked with Morris and they actually showed my face, which is the first time for something like that. Do you have a speaking part? Yeah, I had a line. It was, oh, already, and Carl says he
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