TheBanyanTree: Cheated

[Sharon Mack]

You need to come to the Berkshires...there is just a little of what your
looking for here.  We are trying desperately to hang on to it.  It may
be gone soon, so hurry...
 
Sharon

>>> Scott Daniels <scotrace at mac.com> 1/13/2006 9:17:41 AM >>>

In talking with a friend, I think I have begun to understand my own
fascination with all things from the "Golden Era," the period from 1930
- 1950 or so.

When I was a small child, I looked with longing at what seemed to be
the glamorous world in which adults lived and moved. Watching old
movies, I eagerly anticipated this world of grownup conversations, witty
dinners, deft cigarette smoking and cocktails. Oh! To be a grownup!  To
stay up late with women in red lipstick and men who knew how to play
cards and hold their liquor. 
And now I'm into the middle years and I feel cheated. I'm delivered
into a world of t-shirts and wife beaters, backward ballcaps and movies
centered around fart jokes. Conversations are about what was on reality
TV last night or whose boobs are supplemented. No one writes letters
anymore. People take phone calls in the middle of someone else's
speaking. Instead of the red leather booth, there's a cacaphonic din at
a trendy theme restaurant where you stand in a LINE to be served, no
reservation allowed. Witty conversation is submerged in the jetsam of
fear lest one say something that may, possibly, offend some victim
group, somewhere, sometime. Who wants to speak freely when it's all
written down, carefully recorded, to be trotted out in 25 years in the
unendingly juvenile media, just when you're up for a career-topping
moment?

This is it? The world I get? A world of perpetual adolescence?
Where are the dinner parties and witty, sublty flirtatious
conversations? Where are the get dressed up and go out evenings? The
boxing matches with the men all in suits and hats and puffing cigars?
Where are the restaurants with the red leather booths and big, rustling
gowns? Even the mundane, like pushing back a hat and wiping a brow with
a big red handkerchief over the back fence, talking grownup with a
neighbor. Gone.
Our world allows children to run the show, and rewards perpetual
childishness.  Where are the grownups? The ladies and gentlemen?  I'd
like to say there are no real, charismatic, driven leaders anymore, but
the horrible reality is that there aren't even any grownups anymore. Who
left the babies in charge all the time? 
I feel deeply cheated.