June 19, 2015
Dear Everyone:
Today’s teenagers don’t know what they’re missing.
The absolute best, most perfect time to be a teenager in the United
States was in the late 1960s.
Boys were wearing their hair longer and longer; and girls were
wearing their skirts shorter and shorter.
And the parents, the teachers, and the school administrators were
all going stark, raving, up-the-wall crazy.
An entire generation had, quite by accident, discovered the
Holy
Grail of Parental Aggravation: Long hair and short skirts, a combination
that could only happen once.
How do you define hair as “too long”?
Schools actually tried to write it into their
dress codes.
When is a skirt “too short”?
Teachers roaming the hallways with rulers in their hands,
attempting to measure if a girl’s skirt hem landed “more than four
inches above the knee”.
Where, exactly, does the knee end?
Can you imagine what would happen today if a male teacher ordered a
female student to “drop to your knees” while the teacher held a ruler to
her thigh? Can’t you just
hear CNN’s
Anderson Cooper:
“Tell us, Mr. Schoolteacher, how long have you had this ruler fetish?”
It was a no-win situation for the teachers.
And what made it so much fun was that they could not, for the life of
them, tell you why “long hair” was so “wrong”.
“It makes you look like a girl,” was the best they could come up
with. Really?
And what, exactly, was wrong with being a girl?
Then you could just sit back and watch them try to squirm their
way out.
For that matter, why was three-and-a-half-inches above the knee
perfectly OK when four inches was cause to send a girl home to change
her clothes? Bear in mind
this was a time when girls were prohibited from wearing pants, of any
kind, anywhere on school property, at any time.
Why? One teacher told
us it was because “a fat girl” would look unsightly in pants.
Huh?
A generation later, no one really cared how long or short a boy’s hair
was. A boy might try dyeing
his hair bright orange and, instead of freaking out, his mother might
say, “Cool. I think I’ll do
that too.”
Girls have tried wearing clothes that were skimpier and skimpier, and
the only result was they got cold.
The shock value just wasn’t there anymore.
Sigh. Oh, for the
Good Old Days.
In the meantime, “Jeannie” and I went to see a movie:
Jurassic World.
This is not your father’s
Jurassic Park. Been
there, done that. This movie
needs all new stuff, even though it digs busily through the
tried-and-true stereotypes with cookie-cutter single-mindedness.
We have Bryce Dallas Howard (The
Help), playing the resident much-too-focused-female-corporate-type,
called Claire, who proves she really can outrun a galloping
dinosaur in
4-inch stiletto heels.
Chris
Pratt, the resident hunk, called Owen, proves he can “bond” with
velociraptors.
B.D. Wong, one of the few actors from the original movie, plays the
geneticist who breeds Indominus
rex, a hybrid combining all the “best” qualities of various other,
mostly carnivorous, dinosaurs.
There’s Vince D’Onofrio, who has lost a ton of weight, as
Hoskins, the resident nut case, who thinks breeding
velociraptors as military
weapons is a really nifty idea.
And we have the requisite snarky-sullen teenager and spunky younger
brother, who can rewire a 22-year-old
Jeep in no time.
Neither has a driver’s license, but who’s going to care?
The Jurassic Police?
They take a ride in a geosphere, a sort of giant mechanized
hamster
ball, which the dinosaurs interpret as “crunchy on the outside, chewy on
the inside.”
There’s the ultimate showdown between the “traditional”
Tyrannosaurus rex and
Velociraptor and the “upstart”
Indominus (Corporate) rex.
Not to mention more than enough product placement, which could
lead to a new drinking game:
Take a drink every time you see a
Mercedes-Benz vehicle.
Ultimately, it’s a great excuse to sit in an air-conditioned
theater and eat popcorn. As
long as you leave logic out in the parking lot, of course.
Love, as always,
Pete
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