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In reply to the discussion: The Pretty Little Hippie Chicks Are Grandmas Now. [View all]calimary
(81,281 posts)But I'm reading back through this thread and just savoring every little bite!
I was pretty much on the far end of it, but I loved the free-thinking and the whole idea of a counter-culture - especially as I was starting to wake up and to become more and more uncomfortable with what our leaders and the older generation were doing. I found myself wanting to stand with the protesters and marchers in the streets rather than the politicians and "respectable" elders (mainly men) with their wide-lapels and double-breasted suits and "long" sideburns so they'd look younger, even though their policies weren't.
I was in all-girl Catholic school clear through til my high school graduation. You can just imagine the repression! MAN did some of my classmates come out of there mixed up. Me, too, I must say. But I think I'd found which way I was instinctively leaning. I had to wear a panty girdle too. DEAR GOD - I can personally understand torture! I was somewhat plump, so my mother insisted on my wearing one. At school we wore uniforms so eight hours of the day (and sometimes more), that was my mode of dress. I think because I was heavier that made me gravitate toward somewhat flamboyant personal adornment as far as things like shawls and capes and scarves that would cover some of my figure failures. I looked for, and found, all sorts of creative ways to hide. Dressing that way enabled me to hide the bad parts of me, and they were something of a statement piece anyway - so they weren't just seen as fat cover-ups. I still collect them to this day.
And that was just one way. I hid under my hair, too. Hated my face and my big nose and the fact that I needed small tiles of glass to be able to see through, so I grew my bangs down as far as I could get away with, and let everything else grow too. Sometimes I'd let everything grow and part my hair in the middle, but it'd still hang down in my face. There were aspects of the "hippie chick" style that seemed to speak for me in ways I didn't feel confident to say for myself. It encouraged me to - well, maybe rebel, but mainly to look differently from my always-well-dressed mom who cared deeply about people's physical looks. She'd never adopt that style, and I found it extremely comfortable. And I could be creative and fancy, too. I could overdress if I wanted to.
I was enthralled by that photo of Janis Joplin, nude, her long wavy wild hair cascading down over her shoulders and down her back, her bare front covered with long beaded necklaces. Those necklaces! Every so often you'd spot a nipple. But those many necklaces. I was ENTHRALLED! And sometimes she'd have feathers (or was it a feather boa) hanging down through her hair. INTOXICATING! And she adorned herself that way because she was asserting her individuality and her creativity, her own personhood of her own design, defining and expressing her own uniqueness, and I was just intoxicated by what that said to me.
And if you feel moved to look and present yourself differently, then maybe what it does is free you, or give you permission, to explore other ways in which you might be different from those sharing your space. It helped to underscore how else I was different from my parents and friends and some of my school mates and other peers. In catechism class, I felt free to meditate on these alternative feelings I was having while listening to the visiting priest or one of the nuns expound on life for the rest of us. How they'd lecture and scold about morality and marriage and parenthood and sex and one's already-assigned sexual roles and behaviors, when they personally knew and could relate to NONE of those things. It made me feel free to begin to embrace a political leaning different from my parents. My dad was a Republican. Wasn't so in love with the Vietnam War, but voted for them because he was a business man and hated paying taxes. I found I kept gravitating over to the Democratic Party ideas instead. Not just to rebel but because that was already in me and I was just starting to recognize it.
The whole "hippie chick" thing helped me, I guess, to free me to figure out a little bit of who I was. Not just whose daughter I was or whose grade in school I was or anything like that. And I kept gravitating away from what that "establishment" was and stood for and dictated from.
Funny - you know the old cliche - "clothes make the man"? You know how actors sometimes talk about the costumes they wear in their roles, and how putting on those clothes actually helps them feel more like the characters they're playing? While I was still working, I interviewed so many actors who'd inevitably talk about that. How putting that suit or that gown on suddenly made you walk differently or your posture became different or you suddenly felt like adopting some affectation or way of speaking etc etc. Dressing like a "hippie chick" was one way in for me, into that whole greater mindset of those just a few years older than I was. To reach it, somehow, and connect with it, and eventually meld with it. It started with beads and shawls and long heavy hair, and went straight to my head. And my heart. And my me.