Insomnia Notebook

I did a double take when I saw this Macy's ad last week in my local newspaper. Welcome back 1960s!

That dress looks a lot like dresses my wife wore in 1969, the year we got married. Forty years later time has reversed itself and we are revisiting the '60s.

I think the skirt could be a little bit shorter. I remember them as shorter, or maybe it's just my feverish imagination. Life published some mini-skirt pictures in the '60s, not all of which are represented on their photo website. But this is one I remember from the time.

Yesterday Sally and I watched CBS Sunday Morning with a segment on the musical Hair, which is making another run at Broadway. The creators of Hair aren't the hippies they were 40 years ago, but the play looks like it's going to be a hit all over again. This time it will not only be playing for people my age, but their kids and grandkids. The kids can turn to their parents and say, "And you criticized me for being a punk?" The grandkids can say, "Jeez, and you think I'm weird!"

There's a movie coming up on the Chicago 7. If you don't remember Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, John Froines, Rennie Davis and Tom Weiner, (and Bobby Seale, who made them originally the Chicago 8) then you'll get a chance to see what we saw on the news every night as we followed their trial.

A few years ago I started noticing the boys in high school sprouting hair; they went through a short hair period, then the unruly hair started popping up on more and more young guys. It looked like the same moptop hairdos we tried to grow in the early '60s when the Beatles took us by storm in America, and that our parents and school administrators fought so hard. This time the boys grew their hair out the universal reaction was so what? Nowadays everywhere you go you see people with long hair. It doesn't look as radical now because we've had almost 50 years to get used to it.

In the 1960s rebellion was mixed with fashion. Long hair made a statement. Now it's just fashion. Now that I look like a square old man looking bemusedly upon young men with mushroom hairstyles and girls with skirt hems up to their bums, that the tables have turned. I am now what the older generation was at that time looking at us.

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