A companion piece to Khati's story entitled 1969.
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But that night was the love scene I’ll always remember.
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Extropy — an evolving system of tools, methods, and techniques guided by values and standards intended to improve the human condition.
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When I arrived on the Brandeis campus in the autumn of 1970, it did not have a student union, though one was under construction. We were the last class to use the old mail room. Our new student union, “Usdan” officially opened on November 1, 1970. The night before, with barely any furniture to get in our way, the entire building opened for the first ever “Usdan Lives”, an all-night party full of music, booze (including a punch-bowl mixed up by Mike “Moose” Cole, forever known as Moose Punch…delicious and toxic), drugs and dancing; a tour-de-force of fun. This became an annual event during my years at Brandeis, but the first was special. The fact that it was on Halloween heightened the fun.

Gordon, my boyfriend throughout first semester

I was dating a red-headed junior – Gordon. He lived off-campus in Waltham and had a car. That night, we met at the party, got drunk (or stoned…can’t remember, but we were definitely high and not just on life) and ran around, inspecting every nook of the spanking new building. The music blared, both live and taped, orchestrated by a DJ. We danced in the new ballroom. I love to dance and was famous for it. Guys lined up on the edge of the stage to watch me.

I found the Featured Photo in the Brandeis archives while putting together a presentation for my 25th reunion. I was looking at a small negative, wanting a photo from that night. Only after it was developed did I realized the girl on the guy’s shoulders on the right of the photo was ME (not with Gordon)! I don’t recognize anyone else in the photo. Dig the pants…I had a vest to match. It was a wild night during a wild era.

Food was available in the cafeteria downstairs. People were everywhere. Everyone was checking out the stairwells, the lounges…what led where. The mailroom was across from the cafeteria, a game room with pinball, fooseball, and pool table behind that. It was all so fresh and wonderful. We felt like we were in a dream state (even beyond the drugs). It was fun to explore, unimpeded. We ran into friends around each turn. Offices, like the radio station and newspaper, that would become useful in the days ahead were locked up tight.

Within a few weeks all the furniture was in place and the large building became a hive of activity. We used it as a place to rehearse our Gilbert & Sullivan Operetta, get food at all hours, play in that game room, get our mail, even send intra-campus notes, get tickets to up-coming events, see movies, both classic (Wednesday night) and new releases (Fridays), see live concerts (wearing that same outfit, I saw Leonard Cohen in the Ballroom later that year).

That year, the building was open 24 hours a day, a refuge for the insomniac or late studier with a noisy roommate. I tired to navigate there, knowing there was a friendly guard to help, when charmed/threatened after a long tech rehearsal by someone claiming to be Jack Warner’s son (the studio mogul), I got into his car to “talk”, but he drove right by…a story for another day. I lived to tell the tale. It was in that cafeteria that I fell for the man who would become my husband, wearing a blue ruffled shirt and tuxedo for Casino night. I also ate early that night, before opening night of “Guys & Dolls” and sought him out after my curtain call, telling mutual friends of my interest.

The party did go throughout the night. Slowly kids headed back to dorms or other housing. Gordon took me back to his apartment. We got some sleep. When we awoke, he make me steak for breakfast and took me back to my dorm. I had experienced an amazing night of revelry, christening our new building.

“What does CQ stand for?” I asked. “It doesn’t stand for anything,” he answered. “It means ‘Seek you.‘”
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We were early adopters of email, and also of cellphones. Our first email account was through CompuServe, and our user name was a string of numbers that we didn’t even get to pick, so for me they were impossible to remember. My 32-year-old daughter Sabrina, however, can still recite that string of numbers, twenty-some years later. I could call her up in Spain right now and she would rattle them off for me. We were pioneers. When my now-40-year-old niece, the oldest of the next generation in my family, went off to Wellesley in 1995, she was given an email account by the college. My sister realized that she needed to get email so that she could communicate easily with her daughter, and she had no idea how to do it, so she turned to us for advice, because we were literally the only people she knew who had email. Of course, within a few years, everyone had it, which was a good thing because then we could all email each other.

Our first cellphones were enormous. I wish I had kept them, it would have been fun to take a picture of them for this story, but alas when someone was having a cellphone drive for battered women, I donated them. They were flip phones, with an antenna that you had to pull out when you were making or receiving a call. The featured image, courtesy of Google Images, is approximately what they looked like, but it doesn’t really show how bulky they were. You certainly couldn’t put one in your pocket. And the charges to use them were enormous too. Once for a family reunion we were caravaning from New York City up to the Catskills in several cars, and my husband and I were in different cars. My car was at a tollbooth, and I didn’t see his car, so I got worried and decided to call him and find out where he was. It turned out he was also at the tollbooth, just a few lanes away, but we had to pay roaming charges on both phones, as well as who knows what other fees, and it ended up being about a twenty dollar phone call.

We have been through many generations of cellphones and many different email accounts since then, and each time things improve. When we switched from dial-up internet to DSL, that was major, because before that I had to tell the kids to get off the computer any time I was expecting a phone call.

The next big leap was to smart phones, combining the two technologies and turning the phone into a computer in your pocket. I resisted the change for a long time, even after most of my friends and family had them, and now I have no idea why. I remember telling someone, when I was driving a long distance to meet her, “Don’t forget, I can’t access email on my phone, so if you need to get in touch with me you have to do it by text, not email.” Of course now we’ve come full circle, and even though my kids can see emails on their phones, they much prefer it when I text them.

Mostly, I embrace all this new technology. It does make life a lot easier. But what I don’t like is people looking at their phones even when they are with other people. I don’t allow phones at my dinner table, and the kids comply with that rule, although sometimes my husband violates it! When I was hanging out in Harvard Yard for my reunion, it was depressing to see students walking along the paths staring at their phones instead of looking around them. I’m sure it decreases the number of new people that they meet, because they aren’t available for real-life interactions, only virtual ones. And I also find it annoying that every time anyone states a fact in conversation, someone else whips out a phone to check on whether it is correct or not. I liked it better when we could think we knew things, and even be wrong with impunity, without being contradicted by Google!

I love my iPhone (even the earliest iteration, pictured above), but even before cellular technology, just having a cordless phone was a huge leap forward for me. I remember that first big brick with the antenna. We got it when my first baby was born; it was on a little table beside the chair I sat in while nursing him. That way, I could nurse and talk without a cord tangling across his sweet face, and when I needed to change him, I could continue the conversation uninterrupted. It seems in late 1985, I spent most of my life doing those two tasks.

My iPhone has really changed my life. Now I have a computer in my hands at all times and I am in touch with the world no matter where I am (assuming we have changed our plan and signed up for International calling so those pesky roaming charges aren’t eating me alive).

When I travel within the U.S., I forward my home phone (yes, we still have a landline) to my cell phone, so I never miss a call. The apps let me see everything. I am on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, though I rarely use the latter two. I follow others rather than posting things myself. In the event we are away when a big storm comes, we can control the heating elements in our gutters remotely; we even control the volume on our TV with an app.

Everyone is just a text away. My Brazilian cleaning lady told me about WhatsApp, which I now use to communicate with all my relatives in the U.K., primarily David. One can text with it, but also send photos, video and even talk over it. And it is free!

I have stopped carrying a camera, and I love taking photos. The camera in my current phone (an iPhone 7S) is very good; I can do some editing, and can send the photo a multitude of places.

There is built-in GPS, good for driving, but also walking, which was very useful last May as I wandered alone around Venice, a lovely, labyrinth of a city, easy to lose one’s way. I would put in the address of my hotel and my phone led me home; miraculous.

Though the text is small, I can read the newspaper (I have The Boston Globe and The New York Times on my phone), and through the search functions, I can look up just about anything. After cruising with a bunch of Republicans last June, who were very into “just wanting what was in the Constitution” for our country, I decided to actually read it. So I did, on my phone, in a London hotel. It was clear that none of them had! That same hotel gave their guests a free cell phone to use during their stay. It had the hotel address programmed in. You could use it (rather than using one’s own device) to find one’s way around the city, you could even make international calls on it. We were in a deluxe room, but it is clear that this sort of amenity has become part of the package for a first class hotel.

I don’t pretend to be terribly tech-savvy, but I depend on my iPhone!

The boy rocked in time to the music, rump bouncing against the back of a ruptured easy chair. He pushed a mouth harp across tiny teeth, accompanying a blues singer over the pops and scratches of a fast-revolving 78-rpm record. The harmonica’s discordant moan caught the rhythm, modality, and feel of the music and bounced it back to singer and guitar. The boy wore a striped jersey, baggy blue corduroys, and brown oxfords. Soft-rounded cheeks, nose, and chin glowed beneath a bowl-cut thatch of dark hair. Brown eyes revealed amazement and delight, as yet unscarred by any perceptions of what might follow.

As he played, the boy stared into the album propped open against the bookcase. A Negro man in a white shirt stood in the ruins of a burnt-out prairie home, his back to the viewer, the carved neck and body of a guitar strapped over his belly. Charred planks and timbers reached toward the night sky. They reminded the boy of witch fingers.

The only structure left standing in the painting was a scorched brick chimney. On the mantelpiece, a clock stood intact save for the heat-shattered glass face. Across a sea of prairie grass, a passenger train shone silver in the moonlight, windows radiating warmth into a dark night. In the foreground the man embraced a guitar, black strap diagonally bisecting a white-shirted back. The lonely man, the dark night, the unreachable warmth and movement of the train all cried loneliness, abandonment, and missed chances. Desolation was lost on the boy. He was four years old and was busy making music with the man in the picture.

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I am crying for what isn't.
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The Beatles break-up began in 1969, the year I graduated from high school. I wished it weren’t so, but it was inevitable that they would go their separate ways, just as it was inevitable that high school would end, and everything would change.
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