Things I LOVE About Being a Baby Boomer

Let’s start with the music. My very first 45 (a vinyl record with 2 songs, one of the front, one on the back) was I Wanna Hold Your Hand by the Beatles. I played it over and over again on my pink and white portable record player.

The first poster I taped to the ceiling over my bed was Mick Jagger and the Sticky Fingers album cover. My cousin Carole and I chased Paul McCartney and John Lennon down the hallway at the Eden Roc hotel on Miami Beach and then Rick Shaw from WQAM interviewed us live on the radio. I think I was in 6th grade and wore a padded bra.

I saw Jimi Hendrix at the Gulfstream Racetrack, I was at the infamous Doors concert at Dinner Key Auditorium, saw Janis Joplin at the West Palm Beach Pop Festival and James Brown at a nightclub called The World in Miami with a fake ID. (I wore emerald green satin palazzo pants that I made in Home Economics class.)

From the Summer of Love (’68) through the early 80’s (pre-HIV days) we were wild and free and sex couldn’t kill you, the worst that could happen is a call from the Health Department saying someone you had recently slept with had a venereal disease (VD) and you have to take antibiotics.

It was also a time when you could trust your drug dealer. If they said you were getting Window Pane or Orange Osley acid, that’s what you got. We pretty much invented “plant medicine.” Ha ha ha… it was called smoking marijuana. We smoked it on the way to school, in a VW Van in the parking lot during lunch, and at the beach at night, and all of us were expert joint rollers. Before it was called “Molly” we had pure MDMA, and our Quaalude’s came out of pharmaceutically labeled bottles. I never knew anyone who died from drugs but did know a few who were killed by drunk drivers.

I remember having homemade bead bracelets on both arms from my wrists to my elbows. We strung multi-colored beads on clear fishing line and used lit matches to seal them on. We also did most of our shopping for peasant blouses from the Seminole Indian village off Route 441 near Hollywood, FL.

And I wore my waist-length hair in two long braids, hair parted in the middle.

(The photo is from the Palm Beach Rock Festival 1969. It appeared on the front page of the Miami Herald which is how my parents busted me for lying about where I was that weekend….)

Those were my wild, crazy, and free teenage days. Now I’m planning to have just as much fun and excitement during my “Queenager” years starting now, only the drugs will be doctor-prescribed rather than recreational.

Wishing you love, laughter, and magical kisses,

Arielle