Student fads: hookahs, porkpie hats, and ukuleles

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I work on a college campus, so every year is a fascinating adventure into hipness. What will college students be doing / wearing / eating this year? Hoop skirts? Viking helmets? Fright wigs?

 

 

Actually, this year, it seems pretty sedate to me. “It looks,” I said to the shuttle driver the other evening, “like it did when I first came here in 1978. I guess the wheel has finally turned all the way around.”

 

 

He snorted a laugh. “Did they have blue hair back then?” he said, nodding toward a girl on the sidewalk nearby. “I don't think so.”

 

 

Well, he was right about that. There are always changes and aberrations. But if you'd shown me a photo in 1978 of what the average student is wearing in 2011, I would have shrugged. What's so different about that?

 

 

College students are very attentive to trends. I remember Bullwinkle when he went to Wossamotta U.: “I've got my raccoon coat!” he said. “I've got my ukulooloo and my hair stickum!”

 

 

(Yes, he said “ukulooloo.” I can hear it in my head even now.)

 

 

But modern college students look very similar to the way we looked back in the 1970s: simple, black t-shirts, jeans, floppy hair. 

 

 

But Shuttle Driver was right: there are some differences.

 

 

There is, for example, the Ironic Porkpie Hat.

 

 

A few years ago, all the boys (or at least the cool ones) were wearing classic porkpie hats. It was a little odd, but certainly no odder than the lime-green leisure suit I bought in Spokane in 1977.

 

 

Now they've moved beyond the conventional porkpie. They've actually become post-modern about it.

 

 

Today I saw a white porkpie hat. And a straw porkpie hat. And a flannel one, with a little flourish of feathers, like a Tyrolean hat!

 

 

And have I mentioned the proliferation of hookah cafes in the neighborhood? That, at least, was not something we did in the primitive nineteen-seventies.

 

 

Ah, youth! What next?

 

 

(For us, it was disco music!)

 

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Cracking the Bullwinkle code

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Pop quiz!

 

Explain the following jokes:

 

1. Newspaper headline in a Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon: ROCKET HITS MOON. WALLY OUT FOR SEASON.

2. Bullwinkle, having been rescued from a pit full of poisonous snakes, leans back over the pit before he leaves and says, “Goodbye, Olivia!”

3. Indians in a Peabody & Sherman cartoon attack the settlers by throwing Charlie Barnet records at them.

4. Peabody says: “I have a theory, Sherman.” Sherman says: “Chateau theory, Mister Peabody?”

5. Bullwinkle finds a ruby-encrusted model boat with the words OMAR KHAYYAM written on it. It is, of course, the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam.

6. Rocky and Bullwinkle plan an escape through Pennsylvania: “We'll travel by night and rest in Scranton. There's a farmer who lives near Gettsyburg who'll put us up for a few days.”

 

These are, of course, all from Jay Ward cartoons. I watched these cartoons when I was very young. I laughed like hell at all these jokes. And I had no idea what they meant.

 

Kids learn culture by watching and imitating; they're eager to figure out this mysterious complicated thing called Adult Life, and there's no instruction manual, so they have to figure out how to act, what to say, and what things mean. So they pay attention, and they struggle very hard to figure things out. Nothing is too insignificant for analysis.

 

Here's what I learned: adults speak in code. Sometimes you could crack the code, and sometimes you couldn't. Sometimes you had to act as if you understood, even if you didn't. And there was always something more to learn.

 

I don't know about you, but I'm still figuring out the code.

 

Answers:

 

1. Wally Moon was a baseball player in the 1950s and 1960s.

2. Olivia de Havilland was the lead actress in a movie called “The Snake Pit.”

3. Charlie Barnet was a bandleader one of whose biggest hits was “Cherokee.”

4. Chateau-Thierry is a town north of Paris where a famous World War I battle was fought.

5. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a famous Persian poem translated into English by Edward FitzGerald.

6. The “farmer outside Gettysburg” was President Dwight Eisenhower, who moved there after his presidency ended in 1961.

 

Don't you feel better now?

 

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