I uncovered two pictures from my college years, possibly the only two that were ever taken during that period, and boy did they bring back memories. Omg! We had a vaccuum cleaner! I’m pretty sure that belonged to my roomate Lee Ann. She ironed her jeans, for heaven’s sake.
So that’s me in my mother’s University of Kentucky sweatshirt (which she wore 20 years before I was in college at University of Tennessee, Knoxville), grinning like a monkey in room 513 of Massey Hall, where I spent my first three years of undergrad before moving in with my boyfriend (whom I later married), see next picture.
Just look at that hottie! Yeah, he dug me. I guess he had brought us Chinese take-out for dinner; that would have been a major splurge for us in those days, probably why we got the camera out to document it.
And here’s what else I learned from inspecting this photo.
1. I had a Playgirl calendar. There on the wall! I swear I had totally forgotten about that. Note the strategically placed cat. That was either one brave dude or one placid cat. Not all of the models were so modest, but my roomie and I were. We routinely cut out paper doll-like shorts to tape up on the guy of the month.
2. Electric typewriter, yeah baby! It was my high school graduation gift, and it got a lot of use since most of my papers had to be turned in typed. I DID take a computer class, since that was the rage. It was Fortran, and I damn near failed the class since I was a rank beginner and all the rest of the class was budding geeks. To work on the computer we had to GO TO A LAB. Yep, we trudged across campus to a dank dark basement somewhere and WAITED IN LINE to get on one of the dozen or so ginormous ugly PCs. I decided then that I hated computers. But a year later UTK was on the Bitnet and 8 PCs arrived in one of the dorm lobbies and I was hooked.
3. Sock Monkey!! (Leaning up against the speaker, on top of my albums.) Sigh, I miss Sock Monkey. My great grandmother, the same one who made my pink pantsuit in grade school, made him for me. Wonder where he ended up?
4. Albums. CD technology came out while I was in college, and my friend Robert Bowers invited me over to his dorm room one day to hear a Billy Joel CD (Glass Houses), but I didn’t actually acquire a CD player until well after college. I can almost tell you every single artist that was in that cardboard box of albums: Rush, Prince, Eagles, Queen, Boston, Billy Joel, Air Supply (that’s right, I’m telling the truth here), Asia, and maybe one or two others.
5. Weight belt (hanging on the wall behind my lamp). I actually took a class in weightlifting. Everything other than the weightlifting in that class was stoopid,since it mostly required cutting pictures of buff people from magazines and glueing them on posters for a grade.
6. Analog clock. That just strikes me as odd, now that I’m so used to seeing digital alarm clocks.
7. Gone With the Wind. I was a theater geek in high school. I could recite many of the scenes from GWTW, but fortunately didn’t do so often. I wonder where in the heck that poster came from. Prolly the same place the lame “New York” (Theater Geek!) poster came from. (I’ve never been to NY).
8. TV! We invariably had a television in our dorm rooms, which was a huge treat for me since I didn’t grow up with one. That’s probably why I have the cart over in front of my bed rather than where ever my roomie had placed it.
9. This picture was taken in November. I can’t read the month on the Playgirl calendar, but I think I’m right on this because we didn’t have AC in that dorm, and we baked from August until October. On some magic date near Thanksgiving the radiators in Massey all kicked on and we had heat, but once fall hit in earnest we broke out our sleeping bags and blankets and piled them on. That’s the yellow inside of my old sleeping bag, and it looks like there are at least two other blankets under that.
Thanks for joining me on that little jaunt down memory lane. What weird things do you remember from your way back years?
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