Showing posts with label Happy Days. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Happy Days. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Hot Masthead, Cool Makeover







Check out this hot, cool new look! This boomin’ corner of cyberspace just got a glamour treatment by Pop Art Diva! Thanks, Terri, for this fabulous and colorful transformation for Hottie/Cool. She’s becoming quite a blog babe!

I had a neat experience recently with
Kayla, the teenager and budding author I mentor. Kayla had brought her protagonist into a unique setting in her novel, just in passing. Until we started brainstorming, Kayla didn’t realize this unusual place had a real purpose and potential for furthering her story in a most hilarious way. We had a discussion about the right and left brain—how our creative right brains often give us a bits of information or ideas. Then it’s up to our left brains and analytical skills to figure out what we’re supposed to do with them.

That’s how Mini Me—Joyce at Three—got to be prominent on this blog and in my new masthead. When I discovered this photo in an album some years ago, I knew instantly that it was "the" picture of my inner child. The round, Jester motif picture frame was pure synchronicity—something I found in a unique shop on a business trip to Minneapolis. It took a long time before I realized that Joyce Jr. belonged in it.

Everyone should have a picture of his or her inner child where s/he can see it often. Mini You is the source of your inspiration, playfulness, and the beginnings of your lifelong process of learning by trial and error. Little You lived out loud and was full of wonder! This aspect of ourselves is what makes cool later living possible. If your childhood was troublesome and lacking in this aspect, let Big You nurture Little You and remember the wise words of novelist Tom Robbins: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

It took many things adding up cumulatively before I realized: my intuition to have Mini Me in my blog masthead represents an important aspect of blowing up the old Old. Stomp your foot and refuse to be a fuddy duddy!

Then there is the fact that we are called “baby” boomers. That surge of post-war fertility that we were born of packs a lot of symbolic whammy. We are a generation that is fertile with imagination and creativity. Our population swell is swellest of all as our collective wisdom permeates the general population all at once. In the same way, our sheer numbers, as children, changed how society coped with most everything from child rearing to education and housing.

This year at
Winter Solstice, the Magical Child was the theme of our Solsisters celebration. I shared this photo, and everyone caught the concept instantly and planned to go home and find the picture of her Inner Child. I invited everyone to bring it to next year’s celebration.

Young me and Older Me have a constant intuitive dialogue that Terri has captured as an electric, psychic bond joining past and present. There is that well-known addage--heavy, but at one level highly truthful, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Remembering the best of our childhood past is no condemnation—why the TV show
Happy Days was so popular. Or if we’re condemned to laughter, joy, wide-eyed curiosity, and high energy from here on out, give me a life sentence.


Thursday, August 21, 2008

Mel’s Drive-In





Mel’s Drive-In is really a sit-in for us. We drive to get there, but it’s a sit-down restaurant. We go to an Original Mel’s in Roseville, CA. Like the Wikipedia article says in the first link, the Drive-Ins and Originals are related and full of American Graffiti memorabilia. Mel’s is featured prominently in that wonderful boomer film.

You’ve heard of comfort food. Mel’s isn’t just comfort food for us; it’s comfort mood. The jukebox, the tunes from the ‘50s and ‘60s—and where else can you get a cherry, chocolate, or vanilla Coke? Since our Original got a new cook recently, even the burgers are great! Tim usually orders a Graffiti burger. I like the Patty Melt.

There is something magical about being married to someone not only my vintage but from the same time/space continuum within the era. Tim and I were born only 10 days and 23 miles apart. We are reunited childhood sweethearts, and our shared experiences of place, religion, and era form a fabric of continuity between us. This commonality creates a shorthand that makes a lot of explanations unnecessary. We get each other because we are each other in our formative influences.


Every time we go to Mel’s, the music transports us back to the place in the Chicago suburbs where our lives first intersected in 1959. He bugged me at the bus stop. I thought he was adorable. Soon I was gaga over him and vice-versa.

Even though we were separated from 1961 till 1997 with the exception of bumping into one another once or twice during high school, I can’t help but believe the strong resonance of our first love helped draw us together again. I have experienced mind melding and reconnections with people all my life—the topic of the second book planned in my memoir series, Complete Circles: More Hot Flashbacks from My Lost & Found Life.

Today I just wanted to share that Tim and I are celebrating our 10th anniversary on August 30th. I love it when my girlfriends (and more recently my sister) have younger men in their lives … but I’m here to tell you, I’d never trade in my vintage boomer. We’re a matched set!

I know it’s corny, but we also just discovered on our last trip to Mel’s that we like to share the same drink with two straws.

Think I just stumbled or slurped onto a new metaphor for marriage.

Happy Days!



Photo: Tim and I in 1961 at my 8th grade graduation party.