Fashion revisited

When was it?  Three years ago? I went to buy something and noticed long curly beautiful eyelashes on the salesgirl. I used to have those before. You would sleep in them and the next morning pick fallen lashes off your pillow. I could not control myself.   Where did you have your lashes done?

She beamed. At our parlor, she said. You want? It was tempting but I am old now. Forty-five years ago I would have jumped at the chance. Then we wore false eyelashes daily. I became an expert and could put on mine in a less than a minute. They made your face come alive. Now they are back in style. I could go back and wear them again except my face has fallen by inches and my eyesight is gone.   How do I paste on false eyelashes if I can’t see a thing without my glasses?

In my 20s and 30s men admired me. I would walk in and people would turn to stare. Now I take a walk and everyone thinks I am transparent as air, simply not there. So I live just to please myself.

I hate curtains. They collect too much dust and they block the light. Outside my window I see the leaves of trees and they shade my bedroom. But one day last year they pruned the trees.   I had to think of something to block the view. Once my eldest daughter, Risa, made a lot of things for the home.   When she migrated to the US most of her stuff stayed with me. I decided to turn them into mobiles. They now hang thickly across my window. Her son, Nicc, came to visit me and took my picture. He called me the original hippie. Exactly! That’s what I am.

Ours was a generation of extreme rebellion. We toppled the Establishment. What was the Establishment? Institutions, the way things had to be. Because of our guts the world is now more liberated than before. Women taught themselves to curse. I love cursing but now control myself because people don’t curse anymore. The hippies broke up their marriages because they felt constricted. Up to the ‘50s Cosmopolitan was a fairly staid magazine that featured short stories. In the ‘60s it talked about women finding themselves, burning their bras, leaving their husbands. Fighting the Establishment meant breaking all the rules.

Now only fashion is back. I used to wear mini skirts, three inches below the rump. Then I had beautiful legs. At the office my bosses would always ask me to get a folder from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I would squat to get it. Then the young ladies who took the jeep to work wore basketball shorts under their mini skirts. Now they wear only the shorts. We used to wear what we called hot pants. Now all I can say is — what happened to my legs? They used to be gorgeous ∏— once.

Today they have maxi-dresses. Long dresses with one shoulder bare. When I was young my long dresses tied around my neck and at the middle of my back. We didn’t wear bras. Our breasts were young, upright and proud. Now? Joan Rivers said it best. She complained about a man who tried to get fresh with her. He was fastening an anklet — a bracelet for her ankle —and touched her breast. Her breast was that low. I laughed the night away. Excellent joke. I wonder how many people got it.

And platform shoes! We wore platform shoes in the ‘60s. I remember a fortuneteller warning me about heights. Anything above one inch, she said. It will make you fall and injure your arm. I went to Hong Kong and bought myself a pair of pink and green platform shoes. Then walking down the sidewalk, I tripped and fell between a young couple and scratched my arm on the young lady’s brooch. The fortuneteller was absurdly right.

Being a hippie was a wonderful thing. I remember going to Sausalito in the early ‘70s, the home of the flower children then. There I saw a beautiful thin, blonde, young woman in a see-through kurta, the Indian dress so fashionable then. It was off-white and she was stark naked underneath. She wore flowers in her hair and had been out shopping for French bread, which she carried in a basket over her arm. I was shocked and at the same time envious. I wished I had the nerve to do that.

So the fashion is back but I am too old to wear it. However I remember it well. And all I have to say is that young people now don’t have the same kind of guts and the spirit we had when we were young in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

* * *

Please text your comments to 0917-8155570.