Sunday, November 25, 2007

The Times They Are A-Becoming Quite Different
This weekend, while home in Florida with my parents for Thanksgiving, I randomly found my mother's high school and college yearbooks. Quite a discovery... not quite on par with King Tut's tomb, but exciting nonetheless. I wanted to share a few things from those books. Sadly I only have my crappy cell phone here with which to take photos, so I didn't take that many, and the ones I did look like crap. But still...

This is her high school senior portrait. I cannot get over how young she looks. And that pixie hairstyle threw me off too. How adorable is she? I have to say, after browsing through the entire book, I think on the whole that high school girls were better looking in the mid-60s then when I went to school in the mid-90s. If only I had a time machine...

Almost every girl who signed the high school book used the word "sweet" (or some variation) to describe my mom. But there were also some creepy signatures from men, including this one. In case you can't read it, it says:
You sculpt well. But apparently you do everything well. Come to my office someday. Lenny.
Ew. My mom has no recollection of this guy. But his note, along with many others, led my sister to ask my mom if she was a slut in high school. Her verbatim answer was, "In high school? No." Neither my sister nor I could bear to ask the obvious follow-up.
My favorite part of the yearbook, which I could not get a decent photo of, was in the section filled with various quotes that represented the era. One of them was "Vietnam, here we come!" That was in 1965. Hindsight, eh?

This is from her college yearbook. She went to Cornell (which you can obviously tell from the headline of this photo), and somehow my mom was asked to appear in this Canada Dry ad shot on campus. She's the one on the top right. I've never seen her look so tough ever before, nor do I expect to see her that tough ever again. But it's nice to know she can do it.

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