Tag: The Fifties

Pinky Blinders

Today’s writing prompt: “You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?“

Mine is:

“For me, the Fifties will forever be symbolized by Jayne Mansfield and her pink, heart-shaped pool.”

That is an image I have long carried of the Fifties. Beautiful, buxom, platinum haired Jayne Mansfield hoisted in the arms of her weightlifter husband Mickey Hargitay at the edge of her Beverly Hills swimming pool.

What is it about that image that sticks with me? For me, it was everything that was wrong with the Fifties. The garish and overt sexualization of women’s bodies. The plasticity and pretentiousness of the bottle bleached blonde. The artifice. The illusion of endless summer.

As a child you don’t know what is real and what isn’t. You learn what the accepted reality is from the adults around you and what – according to them – is supposed to matter.

Children have no choice but to accept and mirror this version of reality and it becomes their own. Until it doesn’t. The choice of opting in or out that comes with adulthood.

Even as a child, I remember being appalled by the behavior of a lot of the adults around me. Especially at our frequent house parties. The adults drank too much. Many smoked – a stupid, filthy habit I eventually adopted for many years and then finally discarded.

They laughed too loud. There was a constant low level of tension and forced frisson at these parties. Adults trying really, really hard to have a good time.

The disconnect between what many of these people said and what they did was evident to me. Way too much flirting and laughter in corners between men and women who were married to other people in the room.

I have come to understand how traumatized that entire post World war Two generation must have been. Sure, the Allies had been victorious over the evil forces of Nazism. Sufficiently to declare victory, disband the active war effort and move everyone back into a semblance of normal living.

Turns out that was easier said than done. Women used to making their own money and living independently were forced back into the domestic arena to make room in the workforce for the returning menfolk.

Possibly worse as an expectation, these displaced women were supposed to be happy about it. Doing their bit for the boys and country and all that.

Little wonder that the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield became popular. They were part of the post-war myth that life was not only better after the war, but bigger and better than it had ever been. These women and all the pretenders were symbols of all the freedom and glory the war effort won them.

It was bound to buckle. No society can live disconnected from the dictates of reality indefinitely. Enter the Sixties and what soon seemed to be constant social upheaval on every front: civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the rise of feminism, Baby Boomers starting to come of age. New rulebooks being written.

I see myself and my life goals as having been marinated in the stew of the Fifties. As an adult, I still tote around my little bag of values from the influences of that early upbringing.

The Protestant work ethic. The focus on external symbols of success. An expectation of affluence. A certain generational narcissism about our “uniqueness” that came with being part of the largest cohort of babies born in one period in the history of the world.

Today Boomers are vilified by many. Our focus on accumulating wealth and security worked well for us as a generation. To the point it seems that we have unintentionally scanted the generations coming behind us.

How in the name of heaven did a simple single family dwelling get to be so ridiculously expensive? Everywhere. I’ve yet to find a logical economic explanation.

While my autobiography would open with a description of that superplastic vision of hyper-happy and beautiful young and rich people like Jayne and Mickey, it was evident that fantastical image and lifestyle was bound to be time-limited.

It was a pablum period. No grit in the corn meal. No starch in the shorts. Just fun and glitz and partying and happy. Always happy. Perpetual adolescence.

The generation that lived it up in the Fifties eventually came back to a place of reckoning in the decades that followed. More settled and mature. Yet some of the Fifties core values are worth hanging on to.

A fierce sense of justice and atonement emerged from the detritus of war. An inherent world-wide sense of the fragility of peace and human life. The focus on stability to ensure the healthy growth of the upcoming generation. Medical and technological advances galore.

For those of us shaped within the confines of that decade, many of the images endure and maybe some of the values, too. Our crowd is leaving the planet and will have left its mark on the world as every generation inevitably does.

I recently read there are now more millennials in Canada than there are “baby boomers.” The great cull has begun. Soon, the pluses and minuses scored by our generation will be consigned to the history books.

And when it is, I have a strong suggestion for the image that best represents us for the cover.

Feelings Check

Occasionally, I like to trot out and test-drive the emotional impact of my writing on real people. I’ve had a range of reactions. Sometimes the reader is amused, aghast, or apoplectic (Well, not really the third one but the alliteration was too tempting to pass up).

Does the writing elicit the response I was going for? Laughter. Tears. Outrage. Or does it elicit another type of response? Confusion. Disinterest. Boredom. I would die of mortification if my writing caused someone to die of boredom. Honest to God, my worst fear. Or one of them anyway. I would never recover.

That said, I have shared snippets of my intended book right here in this blog. The Ladies Lunch piece? Remember that. A cousin was good enough to write to let me know that the scene rang true to its time and place. She also said my words were “vibrant.” I liked that. Another dear author friend told me that another blog post I wrote elicited “two titters” out of a possible three. That is, it made him laugh. If you understood this guy’s sense of humor, you’d know what high praise that is for my post.

And then there is the person with whom I shared some of the darker issues that will be explored in my memoir. She almost reflexively advised me that “she worries” I will be at risk in the family of deepening old wounds or aggravating new ones. I’m not disagreeing with her. But what I know for sure is that keeping the truth and deeply scarring emotional wounds hidden is much more damaging and dangerous than hurting the perpetrators’ feelings.

That particular response, unsurprisingly, came from someone in the very society I struggled so hard to escape. It spoke volumes about the collective worldview we were raised in. “Be nice.” “Don’t tell.””Never say shit even if you have a mouthful.” I’ll say more about that worldview later. Much more.

Ladies Lunch

The memoir progresses. This vignette shines a light on the hypocrisy-ridden social class into which Mom had married. In a small, mid-century Maritimes town, she could be a shocking, therefore, slightly suspicious character. Yet fitting into Fredericton society was my mother’s highest ambition. But she was determined to do it her way. The path that country-born little girl chose to achieve that ambition, which she eventually did, was fraught and not without considerable collateral damage. Mom’s strategy in navigating those social strictures could be clever if alienating – both for her and for her family. In a bigger city, she might have been featured in a woman’s magazine as a rising feminist. But this was the Fifties and the widescale feminist movement was many years away. Mom had to make do.

“Once she had married a lawyer, Mom became a de facto member of the local “lawyers’ wives” club. These women’s only social connection was what their husbands did for a living. In the Fifties, that was considered enough.

The lady wives all arrived shortly before lunchtime toting their contribution to the potluck in Pyrex casserole dishes. The crisp cotton knee-length dresses they wore were usually set off by a dainty string of pearls. Their huge diamond wedding rings were on full display. Lunch would be set up on a buffet side table and then each lady served themselves before sitting down.

I imagined a Jello aspic with ham and marshmallows as part of the menu. After lunch, several of the wives, who lived to play cards, would stay to smoke and wile away the rest of the afternoon playing bridge. Aside from the aspic, gossip was the real main course.

One day, the discussion moved front and center to the outrageous and indiscreet affairs of Edith A. who was one of their own. She was married to powerful local lawyer Francis A. who was generally regarded as a not-nice guy. There was considerable sympathy for her deplorable marriage as he was not only not nice but not terribly attractive. It seems Edith sought comfort outside her marriage to balance Francis’ emotional – and it was said – sexual inadequacy. The ladies cooed and clucked at length about “that Edith” and her indiscretions. “A disgrace,” they all said, nodding in agreement “Her poor children. Putting them through all that. And so publicly.”

Mom and Edith were once close friends. That is until Edith slept with my father some years later and the friendship became difficult to sustain. But at this lunch, Mom was still on friendly terms with her.   Mom felt a rush of protectiveness and outrage over the ladies’ savaging her dear friend, Edith. After listening quietly for a time, Mom piped up and directed a question to one of the other lawyer’s wives. “Ann,” she asked innocently. “How many times a week do you and Pat have sex?”

There was a collective intake of breath at the table. The lawyers’ wives were clearly aghast and embarrassed. Picking up on their shock and disapproval, Mom looked innocently around the table with a perplexed look on her face: “I’m so sorry. Did I say something wrong? Everyone was talking so freely about Edith’s sex life, I thought there wouldn’t be anything wrong with discussing our own.”

Mom neither smoked nor played bridge. However, I guessed that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t stay after lunch to smoke and play cards with the other lawyers’ wives. Or perhaps it was because her ham and marshmallow aspic wasn’t quite up to snuff. Hard to say.

The Book Doula

I’m profoundly aware of the superfluous crud that is piled on all of us during our lifetimes. Lucky and special is s/he who manages to elude the influences that accompany the circumstances of our birth. Luckiest of all are those who arrive at a point where they can stand up, turn around, stare their respective cultures/families/childhoods/religions or what-have-you in the eye, and declare: “Not for me, mate. Not having it. I’m out of here.” There are many wonderful books on that very theme. Escape. Transformation. Becoming who you really are. We are all born into a particular time and place in the history of the world. We come out of the chute with much that is predetermined. Our gender, our race, our culture, our lineage, and our family. All of these elements are generally non-negotiable in our formative years. A lot of what I learned in my childhood I now realize was first-rate horse puckey. I can see clearly how my parents bobbed along trying to conform to the dictates of their time. The house. The car. The multiple businesses. The lakeside cottage. I can also see clearly how wrong and misguided those dictates were. I’m engaged in the necessary task of sorting memories and events into “scenes” and categories to link them together as chapters in my book. Who was ultimately responsible for the bad things that happened? Were my parents villains or victims? The “fabulous Fifties” was a flaky, flashy decade and a false front devised as social propaganda to soothe a war-weary world. (The Sixties saw through the facade in short order and set out to upend it.) I grew up, for example, believing a person’s personality and character are fully formed and unchangeable by a certain age. It was the Jesuits, I thought, who used to say: “Give me a child until the age of seven, and I will give you. the man.” It turns out that quote was originally espoused by Aristotle way back in the day. More sinisterly, centuries later, the quote was attributed to Aryan-obsessed Adolf Hitler. With his good buddy Heinrich Himmler, Hitler carefully cultivated little kindergartens of Lebensborn all over Germany. (Ednote: Predictably, the adult children of the Nazi’s Lebensborn program – many now senior citizens – have come forward to seek each other out and connect for mutual support over their sketchy origins: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15548608)
So to put all our difficult memories behind us, we need courage and we need support. That is a major learning that arose for me yesterday in a conversation with book coach June Bennett (https://theauthoroasis.com/about/). Our meeting was a happy coda to the Perfect Your Process Writing Summit that ended yesterday. June offers a free initial consultation for writers to explore their projects and how her services as a book coach might help. Turns out she once really was a doula in real life. As a writer, June has written her own books and coached many authors into finishing and delivering a book of their own. We agreed the baby and book delivering processes are similar and may even be guided by the same Higher Power. But I digress. June asked to record our conversation and will deliver a finished transcript back to me with her proposal for working together. This transcript will be prepared thanks to the capabilities of a program called Otter.ai. We truly live in an age of miracles. I made sure June is mindful of my goal to get a book proposal submitted to the Hay House book proposal contest by the June 5th deadline. Win, lose, or draw in the contest, the book must still be written. It may be very helpful to have June’s services as a sounding board and hand holder. I tend to meander. June and I talked for a solid hour and a half and left our conversation at this. She will come back to me with a proposal for working together. If it sounds like what I need, we’ll make an agreement to work together for the next five months. For my part, I am just happy to know that people such as June Bennett exist. Sheltering ports to weather creative storms.