“Say CHEESE!”

A grin the size of a crater stretched over my face. My Afro sprouted from my head like a neatly-trimmed bonsai tree. My long neck was buried under a forest green turtleneck like a tortoise shell, and my eyebrows plucked pencil thin, were drawn into quarter moons. The official “say cheese” picture for high school graduation shouted white, middle-class girl on the verge of being a hippie.

Back in 1976, my parents gave me a three-piece luggage set for “the big” graduation gift. No hint there, whatsoever. It was simply goodbye with a kiss. Graduates today still receive the gift of wheels, but usually not the wheels of a suitcase anymore. Their wheels are more likely to be a clunky old family car or a flashy Mini Cooper.

Overprotective parents like mine still exist. Dads still deepen their grooves on their foreheads and moms still drip tears when they say goodbye to their 18 year-olds, but parents are overheard whispering these days, “It’s okay to come home and claim your bedroom back, and don’t worry, our insurance still covers you.”

Forty years is a generation and then some. That’s how long it’s taken for the styles of the 70’s to roll around again. On my last visit to the local mall, I had flashbacks of the way we used to dress, and when I came back to the present, it was head to toe, daja vu.

Boys still grease their hair to keep their spikes looking spiffy, and some boys are wearing Afros again. And have you seen the groovy duds young women are wearing lately?

Girls are squeezing into mini-skirts, and under their minis, their legs are covered in netted and lacy tights. Those most familiar tights that come in bright reds, pinks and shades of black, of course. They’re the fishnet stockings when I was fifteen, but now they’re called “footless textured tights.”

Young women are wearing colorful strings of beads again. Beads are still beads, but hippies like me used to throw on our beads and throw up our fingers, “Make love, peace, sister.” Our “love” beads naturally went well with embroidered peasant tops made in India and ruffly layered skirts made in India. Girls now slip on the peasant threads, but call it “ethnic clothing”. It’s still loosely-fitted, still ruffled and embroidered, and it’s still being made in India.

Jewelry, to be fashionable these days, just like the old days, must look homemade. Bangles on the wrist must jingle jangle to get attention, and stones must dingle dangle on a thick black string to qualify as handmade chokers.

Cork-wedge platforms have stumbled out of my 70’s closet, and somehow managed to find their way to the poor innocent feet of girls wearing them today. You can spot these girls easily because you see them tip toeing in their wedgies so they don’t fall over. Those skyscraper shoes barely lasted us two blocks of comfort. After that, we were in serious pain and danger. That’s why we nicknamed them “ankle busters.”

Green or purple hair is still the way to go if you want to rebel in style, but changing your hair color is easier to do now. When we dyed our hair green or purple in the 70’s, we were seriously protesting because we couldn’t wash the color out. We were angry, we had a war to protest. Our mother was over thirty, and we didn’t trust her. We were against nuclear power. Today, when you paint your locks funky colors, it’s more of a fashion statement. Since you can make your hair purple today, and shampoo it out tomorrow, it’s pretty hard to make purple hair political.

Punks tattooed and pierced their bodies, just as they do today. But tattoos and piercings have gone totally mainstream. More young people get a tiny butterfly tattoo on their ankles so they can keep it a secret under their socks. Or they sneak a tattoo of tiny flowers you can hardly see on the hips. They pierce their bellies, and then cover them up with T-shirts. Even young people whose mothers say no to tattoos often get away with washable tattoos or stick-on ones.
Young people are sporting tie-dye shirts again. But the tie-dye shirts that have bounced back are mass-produced today. When we tie-dyed T-shirts in our sinks, we used to let the tablets of the Rit-dye fizzle out, dunk the twisted T-shirt glob into a big bowl of color, then twirl the rubber-band wad ’round and ’round till the shirt came out a messy, swirlagig of blotches, not the neat spider webs of color you see today.

We wriggled into jeans, the wide-legged kind, and called them bell bottoms, and the low-rise jeans of today were called “hip huggers.” New jeans are still made to look worn-out today, but in the 70’s, we grunted and groaned into faded, brushed and stone-blasted jeans. Today, young people huff and puff into jeans that are “stressed.”
Young people still eat rabbit food, even though we thought tofu and organic vegetables were invented by us after we celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970. Young people now keep green by saying no to the paper and plastic bag question at the grocery store as they toss their gourmet coffee beans into a hemp bag. The hemp bag should be new, though.

Just to show everyone that you weren’t born yesterday.