What’s a book, movie, or TV show that you wish you could experience again for the first time?
I’ve written before about seeing Star Wars and the big movie musicals of the late 70s over and over again. Grease in particular was so fun to see on the big screen for the first time. The “teenagers” in the movie were a few years older than me and they made high school look like, well…a Hollywood musical. What could be better? And it’s hard to explain just how appealing young John Travolta was back in the day.
I had a poster similar to this in my bedroom (though mine was in color).
OK, I looked it up and Travolta was actually 24 when he played Danny Zuko. And Jeff Conaway, who played Kenickie, was 28. (So I was a 13-year old lusting after grown men twice my age.)
I grew up on Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, Free to Be You and Me, Zoom and Schoolhouse Rock. Even the rigid old Catholic Church (my nemesis) got a makeover in the 70s as a result of Vatican II. (Think felt banners and folk music). Also, I was a Camp Fire Girl, which was much more “hippie granola” than Girl Scouts.
Camping with the Camp Fire Girls in 1975
Granted Reagan and AIDS in the 80s put a dark tint on my rose-colored glasses, I still somehow believed we were headed toward a more perfect union where the “general welfare” was the goal.
Kids who grew up in the 70s have the Preamble to the Constitution lodged in their brains forever thanks to Schoolhouse Rock!
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 brought those old feelings back. Justice, equality, peace, happiness, community seemed achievable.
MLK’s vision of the Beloved Community resonated strongly with many 70s kids who also loved Sesame Street and other PBS shows promoting those ideals.
I now feel as if I was living in a highly privileged bubble, which has been unequivocally popped.
I’d like to stay positive for the sake of my kids and grandkids, but I just don’t know if we’re going to see anything like that in my lifetime.
We’ve gone so very far in the other direction.
A UFC Fighting Cage being erected at the White House in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday—kinda just says it all.
In case you haven’t heard, a major winter storm is coming—the likes of which we haven’t seen around here since 2022.
It’s currently 1 degree Fahrenheit and the grocery stores will be packed today with everyone trying to stock up before the snow starts tomorrow around noon. (At this point, I’m still planning to go to church tomorrow morning.) People in non-snow climates: the idea of being stuck inside with your loved ones for 24-48 hours tends to make people buy eggs, milk, bread and firewood like they’re going out of style.
A shared memory for GenXers from Massachusetts is the Bizzard of ‘78, when they cancelled school for like a whole week. It was awesome. People remember jumping off their roofs into huge snowbanks, bumper skiing (when you hold onto your friend’s bumper and they pull you down the snow covered street), and building giant holes and igloos which could’ve collapsed and suffocated their occupants at any moment. There were surprisingly few snow accidents, although one friend’s brother was very seriously injured by a plow that didn’t see him playing in a snow bank. Stay OUT OF THE WAY of the plows, people!
My doll and me tasting the snow in February 1969
The famous Blizzard of 1978 brought us like 4 feet of snow and no school for days on end.
In 1978, 7th graders were far too cool for snow pants, so we just wore jeans to play in the snow.
My son on a huge snowbank in APRIL 2005 – the “April Fools Day” storm
My kids shoveling out a car after Winter Storm Nemo (aka the Blizzard of 2013)
And the stairs
My son “swimming” in the snow in January 2015. He was determined to make it out to his basketball hoop after Hurricane Juno.
The week between Christmas and New Year’s is unlike any other.
No school. No work (or less work) for many. Hopefully all the shopping, wrapping and cooking paid off on Christmas and everyone had fun, but now is the time of no chores, no commitments, no challenges.
I told my husband it’s “anything goes” week. If he wants three Godiva chocolates for breakfast, that’s fine. If I want to wear my Comfy and slippers into a store, I will. (My slippers have hard bottoms, like real shoes 😉.)
My high school did the musical “Anything Goes” when I was in junior high in the late 70s, so I never got to be in it. But my friend’s older brother had one of the lead roles. We idolized those older kids and couldn’t wait to get to high school so we could be in the musical too. I still remember all the songs, especially the title song.
Here’s Sutton Foster in the Act 1 Finale of Anything Goes on Broadway. She got a Tony Award for her part in this production.
Welp, yesterday we learned that Ozzy Osbourne passed away at the exact same age as Jimmy Buffett—76. So, I decided to ask my “Generation Jones” husband (age 63) the same questions about Ozzy that I had asked him about Jimmy Buffett two years ago.
Question: You heard the news that Ozzy Osbourne has died at age 76. How did it make you feel?
Answer: Surprised. I didn’t know he had Parkinson’s and I had heard about the farewell concert two weeks ago (which was billed as the last time Black Sabbath would ever play together).
Question: What were your overall feelings about Ozzy?
Answer: I really liked Black Sabbath, but only with Ozzy. Together they were great. (Didn’t really like Ozzy on his own or Black Sabbath without Ozzy.) Iconic sounds. Ozzy’s voice and Tony Iommi’s guitar…there was nothing else like it at the time (early 70s). First started listening to Black Sabbath in junior high school.
(Tells me the whole story about how Tony Iommi’s fingers were severed in an industrial accident, which forced him to play the guitar an octave lower and make that incredible sound.)
We then listened to a couple of his favorite early 70s Black Sabbath songs: “Sweet Leaf” “Into the Void” “NIB”
He says that their 1978 album “Never Say Die” was the last album of theirs that he liked.
Question: What made him a cultural icon?
Answer: The Black Sabbath/Ozzy sound. They were the first ones. The low guitar, the slow riffs, Ozzie’s Voice. Influenced everything that came after.
As an illustration of how truly different and awesome their sound was at the time, we looked at the Billboard Top 100 Hits of 1971. And I really got the point. I mean…I love Carole King, The Osmonds, The BeeGees, John Denver, etc…but you can see how Black Sabbath felt like the start of something entirely new and exciting to a lot of people—boys especially.
And then came the true revelation: my husband still listens to Black Sabbath all the time—even more than Led Zeppelin—especially in the gym.
It’s his jam.
Deadlifting 485 pounds
I guess Black Sabbath makes a better soundtrack for powerlifting than say… Taylor Swift. I get it!
Question: Would you say that they were a uniquely British band?
Answer: No. They were just completely different than anything else out there.
Question: You’ve now read his obits, was anything a big surprise?
Answer: No. (Already knew the whole story of Sharon dragging Ozzy out of the gutter and resurrecting his career—way before “The Osbournes” TV show.)
Question: Did you ever know any other big fans?
Answer: We all listened to them in high school. (He has an older Boomer sister who introduced him to cooler music in the 70s. Meanwhile, I was listening to The Osmonds and the Bay City Rollers.)
Question: What do you think his legacy will be?
Answer: First answer: young people don’t listen to Ozzy anymore.
Upon research, we learned that certain subgenres of metal continue to cover Black Sabbath songs and even sound a lot like them.
As of today, May 31, 2025, Greater Boston is experiencing its 12th consecutive rainy weekend. Since early March, every weekend has included some measurable rainfall, with more than half of those weekends seeing rain on both Saturday and Sunday.
GenX, there are a couple of rain songs from our childhood that will never leave my brain.
The first is “Rainy Days and Mondays” by The Carpenters. It came out in 1971.
The other one is “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” by BJ Thomas. (I didn’t know the artist. I looked it up just now.) It came out in 1969, so perhaps only older GenXers like me remember this one. Apparently it was featured in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” but I don’t remember that. I just remember singing the song along with the radio, with the most memorable line being “Just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed.” I always pictured that guy. His feet must have been enormous.
What are your rain songs? You know—those songs that just emerge in your brain on rainy days.
I think one of the hardest things about accepting Trump’s reelection is that it feels like a mortal wound to the idea of the “beloved community” that many of us 70s kids grew up with.
Popularized by Martin Luther King Jr, the “Beloved Community” is a global vision in which racism, poverty, and militarism are eradicated—a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love of one’s fellow human beings. In King’s words, the Beloved Community was not utopian, but attainable through hard work and commitment to ethical principles and systemic change achieved through nonviolence.
Mr. Rogers brought that vision to life for those of us who were a bit too young to remember MLK when he was alive. Mr. Rogers (and also Sesame Street) taught us there’s a place for everyone in the neighborhood. It’s better to be kind than to win. Bullies were unequivocally bad. Even the cold old Catholic Church got nicer in the seventies when the reforms of Vatican 2 led to a focus on the New Testament—lots of felt banners and folk music.
And raise your hand if you remember Free to Be, You and Me. For those who don’t remember, it was a pioneering children’s album and television special created by Marlo Thomas in the early 1970s that promoted gender equality, individuality, and emotional expression. Featuring stars like Alan Alda and Diana Ross, it encouraged kids to reject traditional stereotypes and embrace who they are, becoming a cultural touchstone for a more inclusive generation. My sister and I listened to that album over and over again.
Someday Trump will be gone.
And on that day, I’m going to listen to Free to Be, You and Me from start to finish.
I’ve been digitizing old photos over the past few weeks. I have a ton of them. There’s no way I could save all of them in the event of a fire. I wouldn’t even want to. There are too many.
Walt Whitman’s lines “I am large, I contain multitudes” keep popping into my head. I’ve gone through so many phases in my nearly 60 years. I contain multitudes. We all do.
One theme I’m finding is that we (like everyone) mostly took photos on vacations and holidays. And there’s one vacation destination in Massachusetts that everyone knows: Cape Cod. It’s known simply as “the Cape.” (There’s another popular cape in Massachusetts, but that one gets referred to by its full name: Cape Ann.)
Cape Cod is where the Kennedys summered and it’s just one of those places that everyone in Massachusetts has memories of. If you didn’t have a friend with a house “down the Cape,” then you probably rented one or stayed in a Cape hotel at least a few times in your life.
My earliest memories of the Cape include barfing after eating scallops at Thompson’s Clam Bar, having my grandmother tell me that they thought I’d drowned when I went missing at the beach one day, and waiting for the sun to come out.
I’ve been lucky to visits “The Islands” many times too. (If you’re from Massachusetts, you know that The Islands are Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.) But the Cape is where my earliest vacation memories happened.
I’m realizing that the places where our memories were made—where our lives have played out—are quite meaningful. They’re the settings for our stories.
The Cape, August 1970At the beach on Cape Cod, 1970, with my Italian grandmother in a bathing suit (a rare occurrence). I don’t remember how I hurt my knee, but I do remember wearing that huge bandage.
Today’s realization from The Great Photo Digitization Project of 2025 (inspired by the tragic California wildfires) is that I was an extremely well-dressed child. (My own kids were nowhere near as well-dressed as my sister and I were.)
And this was before the era of “fast fashion,” so my mother made many of our dresses and outfits.
We always had matching accessories too. Note the headband in this shot:
With my baby cousin Steven and Aunt Betsy, 1971
In my old photo albums, one accessory is featured more than all the others and that is color-coordinated kneesocks. I remember having a drawer full of them. Thinking back, they were pretty cool because they came in so many different colors and were way more comfortable than tights.
Knee socks and a matching purse for the first day of first gradeNovember 1972Note the “milk box” near the front door (I am old)Heading off to Town Day 1973
Facilitated by my mother and a Marshall’s opening up in my town in the late 70s (“Brand Names for Less”), I ended up being a major clothes horse right through high school. I embraced the Reagan era “preppy look” and had dozens of sweaters in every color of the rainbow. My closet looked like a Benetton store.
My high school preppy look
It wasn’t until I tried to fit all my clothes into a tiny freshman dorm closet that I realized how ridiculously many I had.
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