When we got back to the States in the great year of the Bicentennial, 1976, full of loud colors, loud people , and that weird Bicentennial symbol was on everything from Bicycles to Bikinis! We had lived on an island in the Arctic Circle for years, now we were thrust into Televisions everywhere telling blatant lies! The best thing we could do to survive was sneak downstairs after hours and watch Saturday Night Live! There were so many Channels! So many people! So many commercials! In Iceland we had one Channel my Mom had her own show even! The stuff they played all day was old movies from the silent era all the way to the Sixties if you were lucky, and NO commercials , except for the American Armed Forces Radio and Television Service and they were just American Flags waving and Wolfman Jack saying thanks for watching! In Europe there was an hour of really funny and risque commercials and then you got to watch the whole show.
America was in your face! Kids were mean, adults impatient, no one cared about any one person it at school or on T.V. I could not fathom how anyone actually believed the crap that commercials said! We had moved from the lower Arctic to Albuquerque New Mexico. In Kefplavic in the Summer the Sun would slide around the sky, it looked like 5pm all day long really an endless Autumn almost. In Albuquerque the Sun would hover over your head ALL DAY LONG! It was like walking under an operating lamp all day, a feeling I was all to familiar, and uncomfortable with.
There was so much information and so many things to do in this new Place Called New Mexico, America, the United States. registering for school , registering at the Library, rushing to new classes through crazy halls with mean kids. I remember I was late to class cause I was in the Bathroom trying to go number two after everyone left because there were no walls around the commode! In the hallway was a tall confused looking Vietnamese fellow. I'd had lots of Filipino friends in Iceland so he didn't seem so different to me. He tried to ask me a question in English, and I was completely confused. Then he showed me his schedule. I managed to get him to the right class and it happened to be where mine was to we both sat down among the stares of strange children and an unapproving teacher. The kid next to me asked why I helped the Gook, I had no idea what that meant I guessed they were a band and replied oh yeah they rock n roll! I was enrolled in gifted classes and got summoned to go there. I got to go there long enough to make a video about us gifted students racing around the campus on our butts, through stop motion video it was great! Then I was told my teacher had enough of me missing her class and was summoned back to history. I asked to go to the bathroom because I had a congenital problem with my bowels, she refused. She finally let me leave an hour later after I had already gone in my pants, but made me leave through the front door so everyone could see the big stain. They called me Stink Bomb from that day forward. I ended up going to the Nurses office, I told them my mom had come went out back, climbed over the fence and crossed the mesa to the Air Force base where we lived chasing Horny toads and discovering a new little oasis that had a creek next to the Base fence.
So here we were in a place where all the cartoons were supposed to be great where shows like Six Million Dollar Man and Planet of the Apes came on, and the where you could go outside with out a Jacket. I hated it. America the beautiful? America the mean was more like it!
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