My research for this post took me to Cassini, Dior, Balenciaga, Chanel, and back to Cassini. Images for the fashions we wore as young women in the 1950s just don’t resonate accurately with the pictures I see in historical references to the designers. Long before we saw the fashions, we… Read More »From Runway to Real Life
Today The Heiress seems such a simple story— a Harlequin romance, without the feel-good ending—but at the time, it got my attention, and I remembered it for decades. The movie was filmed in 1949, but didn’t reach the northern Canadian community where I lived until I was thirteen, in 1952. … Read More »“The Heiress”, Smash Hit of 1949
The first sign of impending old age, and it’s twin, Alzheimer’s, the pundits say, is the tendency of older people to put less effort into their social network. “Mum doesn’t go out much anymore”, adult children worry, “Her circle of friends is getting smaller and smaller.” It could be her… Read More »Culling Your Relationships As You Age
In a list of significant movies of 1948, So Dear to My Heart hardly makes the cut, and doesn’t even merit a full page on Wikipedia, but for me, a girl living on a farm in northern Canada, it was spectacular. True, it was the first movie I had ever… Read More »So Dear To My Heart-The Movie
In the summer of 1959 I discovered a book, Bonjour Tristesse that radically altered my idea of relationships. Françoise Sagan, a young eighteen year old author, spoke about what it felt like to give yourself over to love, in this case, not a lover, but her father. Hers was an obsession… Read More »Ships That Pass in the Night – Relationships We Have Lost
It was a wonderful time to be young—and crazy about fashion. It was 1956, and I was seventeen. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Rita Hayworth were regulars on the cover of popular magazines. Audrey Hepburn was larger than life in the movies. They were beautiful, slim and famous. I did… Read More »Crazy About 50’s Fashion
“Listen to your elder’s advice. Not because they are always right, but because they have more experience of being wrong.” -Anonymous Old people offer advice to spare younger people making wrong decisions that will cause them pain. We have the best of intentions—we want to help them make better choices that… Read More »Giving Advice—Who Really Wants it?
They had the best of all worlds. How will we remember them? They belong to the generation of people born between 1926 and 1945. The world events that most defined them were the Great Depression of 1929-1939 and World War II. They occupied a unique place in history: They watched their parents… Read More »The Lucky Few—Where Are They Now?
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