Shmoozed With Young Friends

When I discovered that Yael and Tova do a weekly podcast about "old" TV shows I revealed that Andy Kaufman of TAXI and the inspiration for the biopic Man on The Moon had been in high school with me. They invited me to join them on one of their podcasts.

It took a few months for us to actually get together on it. The first date they had hoped for found me hospitalized. Finally they filmed me in their "studio" in nearby Shvut Rachel last week.

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"all the non-conformists have green bookbags"

While popping in to comment on some blogs on Shiloh Musings's sidebar, I got sucked into a different blog world. Soccer Dad linked and quoted from Irina's Ignoble Experiment's Blogosphere's gone PC?, who had ranted over a topic on Suburban Turmoil called "Talkin' Bout My Generation." All I can say is that they take themselves very seriously. They think they've invented the wheel.

Every generation thinks they've done it better than the previous one, and most people, by nature must conform to whichever group in society they feel is best for them. That's life. That's human nature.

In the 1960's, when I was a teen and became a "person," there were all sorts of crowds in my Great Neck, Long Island, New York's suburban high school. There were the popular kids who were both top students and athletes, Jon Avnet was one of its stars. There was also a "hoody" crowd, which had very few Jews; most of the kids in that group had gone to the local Catholic elementary school, "Saint Al's" and weren't accepted into their high school. Then there were the "non-conformists," and the rest of us who didn't quite fit into the important categories. I'd say that Andy Kaufman was in a group of his own. I was in my own tiny group of those of us who were getting more involved with Judaism.

Which group was the most "uniform?" The non-conformists, of course!