While retro may be stylish, antique quaint and archaic classy, I lay claim to none of the above. Instead, I can only call myself confusingly anachronistic--infected with nostalgia for bygone eras that were never mine to call my own.
With the re-release of "Gone With the Wind" last summer, I (and every octogenarian in the woodwork) thronged the theaters to see Clark Gable in his original technicolor splendor. To the words, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," I found myself in cinematic raptures that almost resulted in my gagging on a popcorn kernel. In fourth grade, when every other girl in my class aspired to be Paula Abdul, I wanted to be Scarlett O'Hara. During this formative time, I underwent a mercifully brief period where I let Scarlett's Georgian accent bleed into my own speech. I got over it, thank God, about the same time I quit cuffing my jeans and threw out my jelly shoes. Here's a secret confession, though: I still want to be Scarlett O'Hara.
In a similarly obsessive vein, I've watched "Breakfast at Tiffany's" at least 30 times. My dorm room walls are flanked with original "Breakfast at Tiffany's" movie posters in three languages. Admittedly, Audrey Hepburn looks marginally better than yours truly in her slinky black dress--after all, she's a statuesque 5'10" to your humble narrator's 5'3". However, I do believe I'm the Holly Golightly spiritually reincarnated as a little Asian girl. We both perpetually forget our keys, are afflicted with fickleness, use "franglais" phrases indiscriminately and maintain a wretched opinion of ex-lovers.
How I made it through junior high loyally preferring Marlon Brando to Luke Perry and Jimmy Dean to Christian Slater, I'll never know. Years before I first blushingly kissed a boy in the eighth grade, I could already recite Humphrey Bogart's monologue to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. After a particularly heartrending breakup at age 16, I cried myself a cathartic river watching Cary Grant, waiting futilely for Deborah Kerr atop the Empire State Building, in "An Affair to Remember."
Then, too, one must never forget the all-pervasive influence of television--the ultimate cultural normalizer. But even with TV, I've foiled modernity by picking Nick at Nite, not MTV, as my channel of choice. As a kid, I spent many happy hours in front of the tube watching "I Dream of Jeannie," "Twilight Zone," "Bewitched," "I Love Lucy," "Mary Tyler Moore" and "Happy Days." In retrospect, it's just as well that I remained relatively oblivious to "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and "90210."
There's also my odd penchant for soda fountains. Nothing rocks my world more than walking into a soda fountain, putting two dimes on the linoleum counter top and striding over to the jukebox. Then, as the music starts up, there's the faintly exhibitionist thrill to sitting down on a 50s art deco stool, ordering up a milkshake loaded with cream and cinnamon and recreating a scene worthy of Norman Rockwell.
As for music, I prefer Billie Holiday to Billy Corgan, Mozart to Madonna and the Vienna Boys Choir to the Wu Tang Clan. When painting my toenails for freshman formal a couple weeks ago, my reading en route to pedicure completion was Harper's, not Vogue.
All of this, of course, means nothing on its own independently, but inevitably culminates in the rather frightening question: Could it be? Could I really be an 80 year-old trapped in an 18 year-old's body?
What would Freud have to say about that?
A friend recently showed me a BusinessWeek article with a chart determining whether people belonged to "Generation X" or "Generation Y," based on their consumer preferences. It went something like this: Palm Pilot is for Gen X-ers; Motorola pager with colorful case and chain is for Gen Y-ers. Nirvana is for Gen X-ers; Cardigans is for Gen Y-ers, etc. In any case, I was happily skimming the columns, wondering what cliched label BusinessWeek would slap on me, when I realized that I was a cultural nonentity according to the magazine--just a bit of flotsam in this generational alphabet soup.
Upon further musing, I've decided that it's a matter of no concern to be a young-looking person with really old-person tastes. While my particular brand of anachronism is rarer among so-called "Gen Y-ers," nostalgia's a far-from-novel concept. For example, the early 90s had a strong 70s influence, with the flowered bell-bottoms and fusion. The 70s, with "Happy Days" and "Grease," retained a strong nostalgia for the 50s, and the 50s were a throwback to the 20s. And, as the On Thin Ice comedy troupe proved in their Can't Buy Me Love parody this past weekend, die-hard 80s fans linger everywhere, just waiting to bust out with the torn sweatshirts and pink prom dresses.
In a way, lifting personal taste from past decades bears built-in advantages. Quality may well be a function of time. From Salieri to the Spice Girls, time has a natural way of filtering out the fleeting, ensuring that only the worthwhile endures. And in purely fiscal terms, it pays to have classic taste: There's no need to revamp your CD or video collection when all your favorite musicians and actors have been dead for decades. Just like wearing black, your style's always in style if it works every season.
In the meantime, I'll wait patiently for that rare moment when I meet a fellow old-school young person. It's a precious exchange when I can finally say, "What about `Breakfast at Tiffany's?'" And he says, "I think I remember the film. And as I recall, I think we both kinda liked it."
Terry E-E Chang `02 is an economics concentrator living in Greenough Hall. She can shoot straight, if she doesn't have to shoot too far.
