Time Warp

When Ava's school held their annual Gala last spring, the theme was "Decades," and we chose the 1980's for our table. We went all out, dressing up and decorating our table to the hilt. It was a lot of fun, but one of the biggest things I learned while working on our 80's table and my 80's outfit is that...I'm not really a big fan of the styles of the 80's!

Now, of course, the dressing up was fun. I ordered an authentic 1980's dress from ebay because I like to keep it real. This is not a new thing for me...when I was a kid, I wanted to be amish. Yeah, I know. Anyway, most kids would have put on a dress, slapped on a bonnet, and called it a day. But not me. I visited a general store, bought a real Amish dress and bonnet (lots of Amish people in Northern Indiana), and spent hours in the basement with all the lights turned off, candles lit, occasionally warming up snacks by the spoonful over the candles. I dreamed about an Amish family letting me come stay at their house, but knew it would never happen because I wasn't a boy.

Yeah, that was an embarrassing story, huh? Point is, I tend to do things whole hog. Why make a commercial when you can make a movie? Why give someone a single picture in a frame when you could do a whole photo album? Why make a strawberry cake quickly when you can make it from scratch even though it takes about a thousand times longer? Combine this trait with my penchant for procrastination and you can probably imagine the result...a lot of huge, unfinished projects.

But...I digress. We're talking about time periods. Or we're supposed to be, anyway. I kind of got off track. My longing to be Amish when I was young was really just an outlet for my very strong feelings that I had been born in the wrong time. I wrote about 54 stories about girls who bore a striking resemblance to me but were slightly prettier, more funny, and more popular, and how they accidentally stumbled onto some time warp where they could return to a time gone by where their true love was waiting for them. Preferably a time period where girls wore pretty, intricately designed dresses and bathed regularly and guys were gallant and charming, though I was less picky about the bathing than the pretty dresses.

When I was in high school I was watching the movie Titanic with a guy I was dating, and in the middle of it he told me that he'd always wished he'd lived in that era. I couldn't believe I'd met someone else who felt like that! Maybe we were soul mates (Yeah, not so much.)!

I still feel that way sometimes...that as women, as much as we've gained as people, as much as technology has offered us in the way of instant connections and how we can do just about anything these days without even talking to another person...that in some ways we are going in the wrong direction. That we are losing out on the physical connection to other people, the forethought that goes into a letter, the attention that is paid toward someone when we're not distracted by texts and emails.

Or maybe I just want a pretty dress.

Do you have a favorite era you would have liked to live in?