The Coonridge Digest: The world of nostalgia

Greetings from the Ridge.

Now and again Herb and I will make a fatal stab at regaining our youth and venture out into the world of nostalgia. Last week we took another dip into the fetid fountain of youth by attending a Beatles re-enactment concert. Four talented young men who weren’t even alive when the Fab Four toured America put on a two-hour extravaganza for an audience of aging boomers who could sing "When I’m Sixty-Four" with some authenticity.

It was a wonderful evening and I doubt there were many gray heads in the audience that night that didn’t spend at least a little time thinking, "Oh wow, I can remember who I was dating when that song came out." Some of the concert-goers may have actually been with the same date. Those who weren’t, faked amnesia for the sake of domestic peace and tranquility.

I’d bought my tickets months in advance so it was a delight to have the red-jacketed usher escort us to the second row of the 2000-seat auditorium. Herb and I were set to boogie. Of course there’s something sublimely ridiculous about attending a rock concert with an artificial hip, a game leg, and bouts of irregularity, but we had decided to treat ourselves to a hard day’s night recapturing our youth with a little help from our friends.

I plopped down (reminding myself of when I used to actually sit instead of plop) into the cushioned seat and started analyzing the folks in our section of the audience. There were one or two children who were probably thinking that a "Beatles tour" had something to do with entomology, and a few young couples whose parents might have taken them to a Beatles concert when toddlers, but the vast majority of folks were just like Herb and I – nearing the peak of the hill and just starting down the opposite side. A few things had changed since we last met in 1969 – the blaring volume of the music was no longer a thrill but a necessity, and we tended to take up more room when we stood to clap along to "Hey Jude."

Then it happened – just as I had settled back for an evening of reliving life in those sweet heady times of love and peace and tie-dyed underwear, the hand-held devices began to pop out. Cell phones, pagers, PDA’s, HHD’s, tiny video cams, and most prevalent of all, the Blackberries. Instead of an evening tripping with John, Paul, Ringo, and George in Strawberry Fields Forever, someone had plopped me in the middle of a Blackberry patch. Small computer screens glowing eerily in the darkness slamming my 1960’s nostalgia back into the world of Bill Gates and Instant Messaging.

The lady beside me sent text-messages through the entire concert.

"omg! it’s fab! u should c the set!" I was there in the sixties and I know these idiots were taught to spell and capitalize. Maybe it was the drugs. "cn u c the stage frm yor seat?" She was talking to somebody in the theatre! OMG!

I assume that this airhead paid the same high price for her ticket as I did for mine, but she was missing the entire concert. I’ve traveled with folks overseas who have only seen the Eifel Tower through an eighth-inch camera viewfinder, and I’ve known many otherwise sane travelers who don’t feel they’ve experienced the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska unless they’ve captured it on digital video, but this bubblebrain beside me was sitting in the second row of a live concert and all she could think about was telling her friend in the balcony about the size of Ringo’s jewelry.

The studies are just beginning to come out about Americans who because they "communicate" more frequently via electronics, are growing increasingly more isolated. We’re losing the ability to communicate and even more sadly, the thrill of simply experiencing something in a personal way without broadcasting the experience to the world as a sort of "look what I did" badge.

I recently talked to a sweet young lady in her freshman year of college. Now five months into her lonely college experience she hasn’t made many friends. Her evenings are spent sending text and Facebook messages to her friends back home. Her mother has the same shy personality but when mom was in college she was finally forced to open the door of her dorm room and actually get out there to meet the world.

The Beatles did their marvelous thing and once I got Herb down from on top of his seat after screaming the wrong lyrics to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for five solid minutes we gathered our coats to head out the door. That’s when the Blackberry addict beside me clapped her phone shut and began talking excitedly to a lady in the row ahead of us. She’d been texting this gal all night long!

Two feet away!

We left the theatre to the strains of Eleanor Rigby’s "All the lonely people. Where do they all come from?"

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.