Tweety and I have celebrated our birthdays....

Well, my milestone birthday has come and gone. Tweety and I are the same age! I have officially entered a new decade, the start of my third trimester of life.

I'm old enough....

to remember buying an ice cream cone for 5 cents...a hamburger for 18 cents, or a cheeseburger for 24 cents (at Peaks, the predecessor to McDonalds)

to have collected all the Beatle albums and listened to them in front of my Dad's HiFi (that came before stereo!)speaker or on my transistor radio walking home from school

to have seen the Beatles perform 3 times at the Hollywood Bowl

to have gone to school when pants, shorts and sandals were not permitted dress code

to remember my mother handing my father the weekly grocery list for a family of 4...and a $20 bill

to remember having to kneel on the ground to check that a dress hem was not in excess of 1 inch above the knees

that girls carried their books in front of them (boys carried their books on their hips)..no backpacks!

that we did not have a dishwasher or a clothes dryer

that we rolled up the car windows manually

that I put $3 worth of gas in my car...for the week

to remember watching TV in black and white

that our first remote control was still attached to the TV by a cable and that it had a rotary dial. You couldn't flip between stations; you had to go around the dial

that our telephone was attached to the wall

that it was a rotary phone

that our phone number was Poplar 5-8264

that there was no such thing as a zip code

that it was safe enough for me to ride my bike by myself anywhere around the neighborhood

or walk to the park or to the shopping plaza alone

that the neighborhood kids could play for hours in the dry river bed at the end of the street without cause for concern

that my allowance was 25 cents a week...and that's what the tooth fairy left too

that my first stockings were held up by a garter belt....panty hose came later

to remember putting my hair up in rollers every night...and actually sleeping that way

that Ten-0-Six lotion was the cleanser of choice among teenagers

that a Polaroid camera was the latest and greatest

to remember coming home from school and watching Dick Clark's American Bandstand

that my first idol crush was Richard Chamberlain as Dr. Kildare

Paul McCartney came later

to remember seeing West Side Story

and crying at Old Yeller

and watching the Mickey Mouse Club with Annette Funicello

that my elementary school had one entrance for girls and another for boys

to remember being thoroughly terrified by the movie On The Beach

to remember Christmas tree lights that were large and multi-colored...and if one light boew out, they all did..

to remember our family standing in line at the local elementary school to get our sugar cube laced with the Salk vaccine newly accepted as the treatment to prevent polio

to remember the incinerator at the back of our property (and this was a standard 50 x 100 foot lot in Southern California) for the burning of our garbage

And last, but not least, I remember it was my generation that proclaimed, "You can't trust anyone over 30!

What were we thinking?????