{Zara pants/sweater, painted wooden bracelet from Cuba, scarf from Mom, Urban Outfitters flats}
I had a “America Save Your Soul from Suburbia” moment a while ago. I hated the idea of a staid home filled with fripperies of middle income life and nothing else. But today for some reason, I’m wearing surburbia on my face. Maybe it’s this neighborhood. I never think of this side as my neighborhood. It’s just few streets away, where all the homes look like mini villas. I almost never see anyone going in or coming out of these homes. I certainly never hear any sound from within. The residents pass by in the slickly polished cars and roll into their garages.
Today is the only sunny day we’ve got this week and I’m going to the park up here, where I will spend my time trying to read while keeping a watchful eye on the dogs. Even though there is a sign that tells people to keep the dogs on leashes, they are set loose. Who can resist that wagging tail? The rest of us just have to hope they are trained to know that it is impolite to jump in a lady’s lap unless she asks you.
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It’s interesting that we have this nostalgic fascination with the rise of suburbia, those years historians like to call the affluent era. Who can forget the gripping desperation we saw on Kate Winslet’s face in Revolutionary Road? That script’s based off Richard Yates’ novel of the same. Nearly everything Yates wrote was a kind of looking glass through which we can see the intimate parts of 1950s surburban life. I remember watching American Beauty and tasting Lester’s (Kevin Spacey) palpable despair. The rage on Annette Benning’s face. Although the movies are not related, Revolutionary Road is like a prequel to the domestic war in American Beauty. It explains how they got there. It all starts out with the dream of peace and quiet in some lovely neighborhood but soon individual frustrations grow and having no way to vent or discharge those frustrations –because if something were wrong then we’ve have a problem and nothing can ever be wrong where the grass is green and cut short and the children are washed and fed. But something, invariably, goes wrong and like the filmmaker Marlon Riggs once wrote, “Anger unspoken becomes pain. Unspoken becomes rage. Released becomes violence.”
Still I, like so many people, totally fell under the Mad Men spell. The show’s seeing a resurge in popularity this year because Banana Republic unveiled a line inspired by its fashion. No matter how ignoble the characters are, we’re still fascinated. Don Drapper is a sexist, homophobia-apologist not to mention a philanderer, if you’re inclined to look at morals as virtues (wich I am) who has committed identity theft in a gross unpatriotic way (if you’re inclined to be nationalistic and assiduously law-abiding, which I am not).
Even though we are fighting for things that shatter the order that show represents I’m strangely interested in this glossy dystopia. The thing that’s most tricked out about my reaction to the show is my total sympathy for Betty. I am 100 percent behind alcohol-free parenting {although I don’t have children so my support is only moral}. If I were left to an existence of staid living, having for company only people exactly like myself, our lives mirroring each other’s, I imagine I’d booze up a bit in the middle if the day, too. Maybe dance on my lawn hoping to attract the neighbor across the street. Husband won’t be home until 9 pm. He has a dinner-meeting…
It seems like all utopias are dystopias when you look at the underside of them because they require uniformity and humans are by nature individualistic…That’s what makes them so fascinating, that double-sidedness, the ideals vs the reality, the dream vs. waking life.
If you’re inclined to binge, here are few things sure to induce suburbia nostalgia - Netflix is now streaming episodes of The Wonder Years. I watched this show when I first arrived in the US as a primer on American culture. The Stepford Wives, the original book by Richard Yates, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, American Beauty featuring Kevin Spacey and Anette Benning. You can also swing to the other side and look at characters who are desperately trying to flee the settled life via Eugene O’Neill’s Exorcism, or Tennesse William’s The Glass Managerie. And, of course, my interest in one thing always breeds curiosity about its opposite. Are any of you living happily in the suburbs? What’s the best thing about it? Sell it to us in the Comments!
1 comment
:) Jen says:
Oct 23, 2011
The soul of the suburbs is softer than the city. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood. Kids on the swim team could go to the pool by themselves at age 8, and the moms quickly figured out that this was dirt cheap daycare. The whole neighborhood revolved around the swim team and the pool. We’d show up and play with whoever else was up for a game of Sharks and Minnows. We’d bring sandwiches for lunch, and stay until our moms called the guardhouse to get us home for dinner. Hundreds of people would gather on Monday nights for a swim meet. We’d eat good hotdogs and yell for our friends. Calories don’t count when you swim a few miles a day.
As an adult, I live in the suburbs outside DC. My job, my apartment, and my church are all within ten minutes of each other. I only fill up my tank once every two weeks, and I can always find a parking space. When I lived closer in, I had to drive back out to get to work. I was constantly on the road. Now I have more time to connect with people. I meet my friends every Monday night for dinner. I volunteer on Sunday nights, and never worry about the walk to the car.
Besides the community, one of the best things about the suburbs are the trees. Not those ornamental Bradford Pears. I’m talking huge, 100-year old trees in your neighbor’s backyard. I hit up Great Falls on almost a weekly basis. The suburbs don’t have the nightlife of the city, but I find that I don’t miss it.
:) Jen