Category Archives: Girl games

Does anyone remember Ben…

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Does anyone remember Ben Casey/Dr. Kildare shirts? (Difference was one buttoned up on the left and one on the right – I’ve forgotten which was which). White cotton mock turtleneck shirts with buttons up the side in the early 60s, when there was rivalry going on between Ben C. and Jim K. They were great to wear bopping around the neighborhood with your transistor radio up against your ear. Also, as I recall, shirts that exposed the belly button were not invented in the 1990s. Doesn’t anyone remember those cotton half-shirts with the ruffles that ended somewhere way short of your navel? They were so, so cool – literally and figuratively. By the way, I loved those sunsuits. Had lots of them as a kid. Wish I could still pull that off!

Platform shoes were the…

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Platform shoes were the bane of my existence as a youngster. By the age of 13 I was 5’9″, and the guys really hadn’t caught up with me. I soon leveled off at 5’11” and pretty much stayed in my jeans and deck sneakers and sandals till age 18, when finally I started dating someone three inches taller than me who was into all that John Travolta garb when we went out. In his platforms he was about 6’4″, so I could wear whatever shoes I wanted (by then, of course, plain old pumps and flats were back in vogue). Sometimes in high school I would wear clogs (they made a great banging sound on the all-metal staircase running up to the 7th floor tower, where my homeroom was). That was fun. We could all recognize each other by the sound of our shoes, so to speak, and stop to meet and hang a bit in the stairwell on the way up to class.

The spades go two lips together,…

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The spades go two lips together, twighlight in heaven, bring back my love to me What is the meaning Of all these flowers They tell the story The story of L-O and V-E, L-O and V-E, L-O and V-E LOVE! The one with Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Pop starts: Down down baby, down by the roller coaster Sweet, sweet baby, I’ll never let you go… Then the shimmy shimmy cocoa pop. On the last pop you threw your thumbs out behind your shoulders and shouted the word “pop.”

I recently got back in touch…

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I recently got back in touch with my very first best friend, Joan, after losing touch with her for some 20 years. It was with her that I had my first (and last) fistfight; digging in the dirt so deep, it seemed, that we would soon get to China or Hell, whichever came first; dreaming of what it would like to be in college and have boyfriends at the age of 5; pretending that the two vertical cement slabs attached to the stoop were horses. Joan always got to name hers first, which wasn’t fair (it was really just a matter of who shout out first – I guess I was too slow). I always got second dibs on the name, and she always got Sparkle – which, of course, is the elite of imaginary horse names. Right after Joan’s ninth birthday her family moved away, which was very sad. I had no idea where and didn’t think I’d ever see her again. As fate would have it, eight months later I stood in the schoolyard of my own brand new neighborhood, feeling very lost. All of a sudden Joan came running up to me shouting, jumped up into my arms and banged her head into my chin. The joy was immense – so was the pain! I still have a tiny remnant of the chip it left in my tooth. Now that we’re back in touch, the 20 year gap seems like 20 minutes. Connections like that are something special.