Do You Remember . . .

This post will no doubt date me, and might not ring a bell for those of you who are a generation (or so) younger than me.  But it may bring back a couple of memories to some of you who grew up around the same time I did.

 

Do you remember:

 

~ Home perms.  Eee-gods!  The torture we girls subjected ourselves to in the hopes of attaining beauty and the latest style of hair-do.  Seems the awful fumes and tight curlers of the process frequently produced a lot of frizz and more than a few tears.  And possibly a haircut in seriously bad cases.

 

~ Movies in actual theaters.  In the medium sized town I grew up in, we had four movie theaters.  One of them was definitely the classiest and quite plush.  That's where we went on dates.  Going to a movie in a theater was where most of our "real" dates occurred during my high school years.  We always dressed up.  No sweat pants and t-shirts as is the garb while watching a DVD on the couch at home these days.

 

~ 45 rpm records.  One song on each side.  I had my own small record player and a collection of the new releases and old favorites which I played over and over and over.  Much to my father's great consternation. 

 

~ After dinner phone calls with best girlfriends and sometimes the latest boyfriend crush.  No computers or other technological devices of today with which to communicate.  I got into a lot of trouble with my father because of my hour-long periods on the family phone.  One phone in the house, no such thing as a phone in one's bedroom where privacy could be insured.

 

~ Big, plump, red lips made of paraffin at Halloween time.  The lips looked exactly like those now displayed by celebrities.  After Halloween, we always ended up chewing the lips until all the "flavor" was gone.  Yuck.

 

~ Skate keys that tightened your roller skates to your shoes.  The heel of your shoe fit into a metal bracket of sorts in the back of the skates and the front part was held onto your toe area by a clamp on each side.  The clamps had to be tightened by a skate key to keep the four-wheeled skates tightly secured.  We frequently had to share keys because someone had lost theirs.

 

~ Pen pals.  Again, before means of communicating with all the gadgets we have today, many hand-written letters would be mailed back and forth to friends who had moved away, relatives living far from you or occasionally someone living in another country that you had "met" through a geography lesson in school.

 

~ Roller rinks.  If we could coerce a parent to transport us to and from a roller rink, we could rent the boot type skates there and spend an afternoon going around and around on the wooden floor of the big indoor rink.  In junior high school this was often our way of getting together with the opposite sex.  A group of us girls would plan a trip to the rink and, lo and behold, a group of boys our age from school would turn up there, too.

 

~ Neighborhood grocery stores.  There was a small, family-owned grocery store within easy walking distance in nearly every neighborhood.  Once or twice a week, the mother in the home would walk a couple of blocks, or often less, to the neighborhood store to do her food shopping.  If only a couple of items were needed between her regular trips, a child might be given a list with some money, told to go to Mr. Neighborhood Grocer, hand him the list and money, then return home with the purchases and change.

 

Do you have any memories similar to mine (that have now been relegated to the age of the dinosaurs) from your childhood?  Please feel free to share!