Every Saturday, we went to the Oriental Theater, which had a cheap kid's double feature.
I saw Rocky Horror at the Oriental! Great theater. And there was an awesome bar with a huge international beer selection just down the street from there--Von Trier's, wasn't it?
Childhood freedom was big for us, too. We were latchkey kids in junior high (my brother was in high school by then, so he could keep an eye on us until he was 16 and had an afterschool job, so it was just my sister and me then), and when we were big enough, we'd fix dinner so it was ready by the time Mom got home from work (lots of casseroles that we just had to pop into the oven at a set time and temp, and then mix up some salad or cook veggies on the stove).
Summers were great--Mom had a caretaker for us (one of the neighborhood college girls who would just hang with us to make sure we didn't kill each other) until we were all in high school, then we had the days to ourselves. In junior high, my band had summer practice for the parade season in the fall, so I'd have to walk the 1 1/2 miles to school, and the route didn't have sidewalks so I'd walk on the side of the street (saw a dead cat slowly decompose over the course of one summer's commute!). I'd also ride my bike/walk down to the library/strip mall where there was also the ice cream place and the drug store, always good for a Charleston Chew candy bar and possibly a magazine or two.
Hooligan's
And yep, Von Trier's is across the street. Oriental Theatre is still there, but Oriental Drugs is long gone.
And there was an awesome bar with a huge international beer selection just down the street from there--Von Trier's, wasn't it?
I shudder to think what ladies' night would entail at a place called Von Trier's.
t /art movie geek joke
My major annoyance with Jacob was that he had seen the entire season of Dr. Who already, and he made sure that you knew it. It was very "I'm so-very-clever" to my mind and a bit condescending.
It was a great neighborhood to be a kid in.
As a kid, I ran wild in the forests and fields. If we were feeling really adventurous, we'd ride our bikes 7 miles to the nearest store and drop 50 cents on candy.
Yeah, even with my overprotective mother, I would just run home from school, throw my book bag in the door, yell "Goin' out!" and as long as I was in shouting distance, it was all good. (Shouting distance was
quite
a long range for my mother.)
Yeah, growing up in a small town was great. We used to go all over the place on our own, let alone the hours we could spend out of eyesight in our own (20 acre) yard/pond/woods. I looked it up on Google earth recently, and was happy to see it hadn't been developed.
It's not just that we're more paranoid than our parents, though. It's that the world has changed, and it's difficult. The SO & I were talking about it lately, and I don't know how I'd protect a kid from junk on the internet, let alone the larger world.
We're stricter with our students than we would have wanted for ourselves. Although that's partly to do with cultural stuff; part of what we do is provide structure and discipline that they might not otherwise get.
