Don't Lay a Heavy Scene on Me Man!

For a moment, Gerhard glimmered with an enjoyable righteous anger. Perhaps there was indeed a way to blame all of this on her. Wasn't that what a wife was for? Isn't that why people get married? Someone to blame things on." - From Helen Schulman, A Day at the Beach

I'm livin' in the 70's
I feel like I lost my keys
Got the right day but I got the wrong week
And I get paid for just bein' a freak - Skyhooks, circa 1974

Me in Teheran, Pre Ayatollah Khamenei

There was something weird and wonderful about the Seventies.

A time when one could say, tongue in cheek, "Don't Lay a Heavy Scene on Me Man!"

A time when white people could be hip. A time ...

A time long gone, "The seventies too far away".

AbbA. Boomers' kids. The time before the Iraq War, before "Weapons of Mass Destruction", before acronyms, before texting, sexting, before 911, before FaceBook. Before. Before before.

What was the cut-off point? The point between innocence and cynicism? Between then and now? Between the faint hope of idealism and the (false) pragmatic of NOW?

Was it the election of Ronald Reagan? Was it the Gulf War? Thatcher? Y2K? I don't THINK so.

I think that the Baby Boomers had become jaded. For sixty years we've ploughed ahead, against all odds.

And in New-York-Speak - "What can I say?"

I really DID love the Seventies. It was a pause in the world of trauma. The Sixties, Vietnam, had left us and we didn't know about - or even imagine - Iraq, WMD, 911, bail-outs, Osama, Obama.

A time of innocence - The Seventies.

I was a married woman with small children in the seventies. A woman who thought it was a smarte-arse thing to say, with touch of irony - "Don't Lay a Heavy Scene on Me Man!" I used to say it in the heat of arguments with my then husband. It annoyed hell out of him. At that time it was small things like this that gave me pleasure.

Seventies words. I heard a few of them the other day, at of all places, my dentist's.

I really like my dentist. He's so "Seventies". I always ask for nitrous oxide, as I am a nervous dentalphobe. He'll have his assistant put the gas-mask on me, and then disappear to check his email, or to put his iPod on Frank Sinatra. Yes, his idea of music isn't seventies but the rest of him is. And then he'll come back and ask, "Are you stoned yet?"

Last week when I was leaving, and saying goodbye to the receptionist - another "seventies" person, I became flustered. I was attempting to organize a date that suited me, but she was concerned I should come earlier. "Leave her alone," my dentist reprimanded her. "She's freaking out."

The Seventies. Poor cousin of the Sixties.

I think it's time for a Seventies' revival.

Now what was the great Australian politician's slogan in 1972?

"It's Time!"

Pre Thatcher. Pre Reagan. Pre Taliban. And perhaps now more importantly, pre Tea Party.

And talking about the Tea Party, I have just one more thing to say:

Don't lay a heavy scene on me man!