Talkin' 'bout my generation

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film Easy Rider, and the 40th anniversary of the exposé of the My Lai massacre.

It was all one back then, which is why the guys had to die at the end of Easy Rider.

technorati: Sixties

Parents indulging adolescent insecurities with $$$$$ procedures

Middle-class parents are catering to the insecurities of their teenage girls with beautifying procedures that cost tens of thousands, says this article. Of course, this has always gone on: nose jobs, ear jobs and the like. It's the scale and detail that have changed, along with technological solutions.

In 2007, teenagers got 67,523 (laser surgery) procedures -- more than double the number that age group had in 2000, according to the society, which surveyed its members and board-certified dermatologists but not aestheticians or other doctors.

Many children seek to be denuded because excess fuzz embarrasses them. Others want to avoid a lifetime of battling hair. For Christine Furman, of Greenwich, Conn., getting laser treatment for the unibrow of her 16-year-old daughter Teresa was a celebratory event, not unlike ear piercing. Classmates had also nicknamed Teresa "Uno Brow."

Ms. Furman was wary of electrolysis because it had left pockmarks on her chin. But she wanted to give her daughter the gift of never having to maintain her eyebrows again. "She got the first treatment the day after she got off her braces," she said. "It hurt a little bit, so she squeezed my hand. Then we went to Bloomingdale's."

Humorous coda to 'Alice's Restaurant'

Last evening I was doing errands in the car when I happened to hear the 1995 live version of Arlo Guthrie performing "Alice's Restaurant."

As a coda on the 30th anniversary of the original events that inspired the song, he adds an anecdote in which Jimmy Carter's son Chip tells him of discovering, when the Carter family moved into the White House, the "Alice's Restaurant" album. The text of the anecdote is at the link above. Funny.

Arlo Guthrie, born in 1947, would have been only 18 in 1965 when the "massacree" transpired, 20 in 1967 when the original recording was made, and 22 when he appeared as himself in the Arthur Penn movie.

Yet he is now an old man. How do these things happen? Arlo Guthrie grown up, I can handle; middle-aged, okay. But not like this.

technorati: Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant, 1995