Please Take My Kodachrome Away

The Mary Tyler Moore Show notwithstanding, the seventies were just an ugly decade. Men wore really short shorts, white people wore afros, and the clothes were either "hippie" without the causes that made them cute in the sixties or just plain tacky.

Even three decades of penitence and rehabilitation in the post-seventies world of shabby chic cannot erase the hideous memories. And, thanks to modern technology, the yellowed photographs we took with our Kodak Instamatics can now be scanned and disseminated to the world at large, exposing us as the freaks we used to be. For those of us who had the decency long ago to shred all those photos, the sudden appearance of mountains of evidence of unspeakably bad taste is devastating. All those years spent reinventing ourselves, all the apparel bonfires devoted to making the world a prettier place, for naught. Sigh.

Today, my old friend Mimi, dubbed "group historian" by one of the other six in our newly reconvened childhood group, posted seventies-era photographs of all of us on Facebook. And to think I used to be quite fond of her. A pathologically sentimental idiot, apparently, she has saved everything -- pictures, letters (I tremble to think), autograph albums. (Note: an autograph album is the little zip up faux leather thing we all got at the end of the school year so that we could measure our popularity by the number of pages signed by "friends" we barely knew; sort of a precursor to Facebook.)

I suppose Mimi's passion for documenting the past might be useful in my quest to prove myself innocent of the charge that I was the one who first referred to one friend as "Boom Boom." (So far, Mimi has found no evidence of anybody calling anybody "Boom Boom," but the investigation is still pending, and frankly I would like to see my name cleared.) Otherwise, there doesn't appear to be any up side to sharing these pictures with the public. What happened in the seventies should stay in the seventies.

"Who can turn the world on with her smile?" Maybe Mary could, but I wouldn't put my money on any of the freaks in the picture. Possibly now, but not back in the day; not in those outfits.