My Bedroom - December 1970
Here I am, a skinny 14 year old. I got some new furniture: the desk I'm sitting at, the office chair I'm sitting on, the small bookcase and the chest of drawers. Note the minimalist wall decoration.
In the very corner of the room, on the ceiling, is a hook. The hook held the chain and cord for some swag lamps Mom made for me. She painted the metal part flat black and inserted rectangular pieces of resin plastic of all colors into them. I used to turn 'em on and spin 'em around quickly. Talk about a groovy light show!
Perhaps you can see some gold-colored paperbacks on the top shelf of the bookcase: those are Dark Shadows novelizations. There must have been, oh, seven thousand of them published. I quit reading them when it dawned on me that the plot was invariably the same, with only minute variations in characters, settings and time period. (I would have to learn the same lesson four years later when I started reading Doc Savage paperbacks.) For the life of me, I couldn't figure out then - nor can I now - what females saw in Jonathan Frid. The guy couldn't have delivered a line correctly if his life had depended on it.
By the way, in this photo I'm wearing the first pair of bell bottoms I ever owned. They were striped and made of double-knit. Later on I would acquire more pairs as I got progressively more hip and self-confident. Some gold-colored ones went with the gold shirt I'm wearing here. I got some green ones - those went with a shirt of the same hue, and the light blue ones were worn with light blue shirts. The socks matched the pants, of course.
Later on in high school, I collected Levis corduroy pants in every color made. As I recall, the light blue ones got dirty more quickly than the buff-colored ones did. I always wore them with slip-on Hush Puppies.
Yes, I was a nerd.
I have asked this question of many adult friends: "If you could go back to being a teenager, but you couldn't retain what you know now, would you do it?" The answer is always the same: no. These photos and remembrances help explain that.
The photo on the right shows one of my most treasured possessions: my light blue Trimline phone. I loved it because it was so futuristic-looking. Fact of the matter was, however, that I really didn't have anyone to call with it, so I didn't spend a lot of time on the phone as many teenagers seem to do.
Check out those curtains: avocado, dark blue, blue-gray and gray repeating horizontal stripes. Very Seventies. Yeeecccch.