I Miss the Fifties

I Miss the Fifties, man. Daddy-O.

Do you think we could ever go back to living like they did in the fifties? You know, driving big pink aircraft carriers around, taking our best girl to the sock hop, rumbling with greasers and driving bread vans for a living?


I’ll tell you one thing I couldn’t live without, if we went back to the fifties. Mexican food. No way! Come on, Buffy, let’s go to Taco Jose’s! Buenos dias senor Jose, dos chimichangas por favor. Con much gusto! Yo gusto te carne Mexicano.

Back then people got dressed to go to a club. Clubs had class. You had to dress for dinner. Paul Anka would come out and croon by a white grand piano. Now what do we have? Monday night football at Hooters. Could you imagine James Bond at Hooters? Martini – shaken, not stirred, and I’ll drink it out of a test tube lodged between your knockers. Slurp! Now that's classy!



You know what I could live without if we went back to the fifties? Cafes. No more Starbucks, now you have to get your coffee from a surly waitress named Sal, or Bea. Yeah it only costs a nickel but the beans were grown in a toxic waste dump in Ohio and shipped in a Ford pig hauler on a hundred mile trip that took a week on two lane muletracks. Imagine, no more lattes, no cappuccino, no wifi, no Joan Baez or Suzanne Vega music. Instead you get Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, a chipped mug and a sly look. The way coffee was meant to be.

I think we don’t understand the fifties. We look at it through a lens, the media, the movies, as if that was the representation. It wasn’t. That was the entertainment. We have to infer the times through their entertainments. Just like now, people look at a movie from America and think that’s how America must be. Like we think China must be fighting gangs of bun merchants for molesting your girlfriend who you for some reason call “Little Sister”. I mean, can you know French culture by looking at French movies? Everybody mumbling and cynical, you’re sitting in a café and a minicooper police car drives by with that two-tone siren, and next thing you know your waking up in a strange woman’s sunlit apartment on a pile of books and the curtains blowing in; she’s whispering passages from Proust and you’re fumbling around with a dog-eared Balzac.






You can’t judge a culture by its entertainments. You can’t know it, really.

The Fifties were unrealistic? The twenty-first century, though – whoo boy. Global warming, wars for oil, the entire world watching the same movies and listening to the same music, sorry – you were maybe expecting a punchline? Dig that crazy groove, daddy-o!

image credits:
Miami Diner by tycity
At the Beach Bar by rockinbree
Classic Car Hood Ornament courtesy: