Facebook is no use to me anymore. Like many people of my creeping advanced age, I did have a moment with it, between 2008 and, say, 2016. (Rather more than a moment!) My excuse is that I was living in rural Nova Scotia, a new mom to two, and Facebook in rural Nova Scotia is the virtual village message board. Or at least it was then. People went on Facebook to announce imminent snowplowing or Halloween parades, to warn of an alleged coyote in the Sobey’s supermarket parking lot, to launch wild-eyed accusations against their ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was really quite entertaining.
Occasionally, I do dip back into Facebook, still, for a quick browse of my old Nova Scotia neighbors to see who is airing their dirty laundry. Sometimes there’s an eye-popping post about petty crime, a break-in, or a bicycle stolen off a porch (opioids and other pills being a major problem in rural Nova Scotia, just as they are in rural America); sometimes I just like to see how the uniforms are fitting these days on the guys I knew when I was in the fire department, or to catch up on the gossip from the Bean Dock coffee shop about people I once knew well but who are disappearing now into a haze of memory. . . .
Last week, however, I came across something new and interesting on Facebook, for the first time in years. It was a page called “We Pretend It’s Still the 1970s” on which random Facebookers around the country post old photographs — Polaroids, wedding-party candids, vacation snaps, unguarded moments in Gammy and Grampa’s basement rumpus room — and write extended captions describing the scene in the present tense. It’s a reminder of the day-to-day texture and grain of that decade, when a prom corsage was a spray of white double mums as big as a rooster perched on the shoulder of a girl with “winged” hair; when 5-year-olds wore homemade dresses of purple velveteen, and when Friday night meant fried chicken on a TV tray and a new episode of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
This page is a chuckle and, for a person like me who is weirdly consumed by capturing a sensation of time travel, a nice wallow for a half-hour on a rainy Sunday morning. The page description reads like this: “Travel back in time, and let’s pretend it’s still the 1970s and we’re there! Please do not post or comment in past tense. No ‘I remember’ posts! Everything you say must be in present tense, written as if you’re writing it from your childhood bedroom, your school desk, or anyplace you hung out at back then.”
A member named Dawna in San Jose, California, will post a slightly fuzzy Kodachrome picture, aged to hues of orange and amber, of a shirtless and longhaired young man pounding on a sparkly drum kit as women in long dresses sit cross-legged on the floor gazing up: “It’s 1978 and my mom and 16-year-old me are watching my oldest brother’s band practice in the backhouse. . . . My brother is the drummer. I have a huge crush on the singer and I’m ogling him while he’s singing. Unfortunately for me, he’s 26, married with a 3-year-old daughter . . . and I have a boyfriend. Oh, well, the heart wants what the heart wants.” A member named Mark in Trussville, Ala., posts a photo of himself throwing nunchucks over his shoulder; Mark’s caption describes the disappointment of having to wear inexpensive JC Penney plain-pocket jeans instead of Levi’s.
It was perhaps ill-advised, however, that I went on “We Pretend It’s Still the 1970s” and posted my own photo and caption: Readers of this column already know that I tend to go on and on, to elaborate rather beyond what’s strictly necessary to the subject at hand.
But I trotted upstairs — prime procrastination moment when there is yard work to be done! — and into the playroom and rummaged around in a heavy, very old wooden filing cabinet that holds a lot of Rattray images from the 1960s and 1970s, and came out 15 minutes later holding a black-and-white photo of myself taken by my father outside Penn Station in late-July 1976.
In the photo, to use the present tense, I am 9 years old and returning home from my first experience of sleepaway camp. I’m wearing Adidas sneakers and dark shorts and a huge grin of relief to be escaping Trailblazers summer camp in the Catskills and to see my father coming toward me with his Nikon camera. I’m clutching what looks like a sleeping bag sack. Other campers, wearing very 1970s Afros and striped bellbottoms, sit dejected on a low stone wall, waiting for their own parents. Scattered on the pavement are pleather and vinyl suitcases.
Being garrulous, at least in print, I captioned this photo with a long paragraph of T.M.I.: how much I hated Trailblazers camp; how I alienated the other campers by bragging that I’d seen Farrah Fawcett in the A&P; how I’d inadvertently committed plagiarism by composing a poem that — as I realized only after it had been mimeographed in the Trailblazers campers’ arts magazine — was actually lyrics to the song “Sunshine Day” as performed on “The Brady Bunch” (an act of plagiarism that would gnaw at my conscience into adulthood); how we’d been forced to eat beef liver, euphemistically referred to as “velvet steak” and how I refused and spent an entire afternoon forced to sit inside the dining hall alone, and how the counselors had not only vindictively taken away my stuffed rabbit on an overnight hiking trip but had a very, very peculiar (and, yes, very disturbing) rule regarding the wearing of underwear to bed.
The other members of “We Pretend It’s Still the 1970s” quickly picked up on the bummer undertones of my present-tense commentary on what appeared to be a happy photograph of a returning summer camper greeting her family. Lots of strangers posted comments along the line of, “What the hell?” It’s actually a photograph of a little girl, naive by nature, who has seen the mean and seedy underbelly of life for the first time and who doesn’t like the way it smells.
In that way, the picture I picked to post on “We Pretend It’s Still the 1970s” — and then took down, again, having decided I’d gone too far in my frankness with strangers (awkward!) — is a very good representation of that hungover decade.
The 1970s were the decade when naivete — the childlike hoping and dreaming of the hippies and the civil rights movement — ran up against all sorts of ugly walls of truth. Readers younger than me may not know this, but the 1970s were sour indeed. Acid casualties were wandering around and grown men of 30 or 40 felt perfectly entitled to have “romantic” interludes with girls of 14, 15, or 16. (See: Woody Allen’s “Manhattan.”) Reality smacked America in the face in the 1970s.
We collectively remember the upbeat, candy-colored disco numbers, “Boogie Wonderland” and “We Are Family,” but forget how sad the soundtrack was on AM radio. It wasn’t all white suits and John Travolta. Was there ever a more melancholy, more grubby, more disillusioned top-10 hit than John Sebastian’s theme song from “Welcome Back, Kotter” or “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot? How about “The Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To?)” by Diana Ross? Even Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” was in a minor key.
Go on Spotify now if you don’t remember. “Nadia’s Theme” reached number nine on the Billboard charts in 1976, the year of my not-good time at Trailblazers camp. It’s the single saddest pop song to ever top the charts.