Those Were the Days of Our Lives

Yesterday my husband and I went to a workshop so called, presented by the graduating students at the Asolo Conservatory for Acting.  They appear in small dramatic pieces which demonstrate their acting skills and this workshop they will take to New York City and show themselves off to directors, agents, and producers.  As usual we were dazzled and intrigued by their acting skills but generally put off by the nasty tone of the boy-girl relationships on display in the small segments of contemporary drama.  I thought back to my own introduction into a sexual life, albeit with other males, but I don't remember all the sharp, negative, narcissistic tones of the encounters, nor a few years later when at twenty one I met and married a woman.  But this morning's Times had an interesting piece by Wesley Morris locating the present day ill will on display in television romances claiming it was Lena Dunham in "Girls" who first presented mean spirited women and in the end men as well.  Yes, thought I, we started watching that and were amazed at how selfish and cruel the characters were, and thus we stopped.  Well, according to Morris it got worse season after season, and as I guess is the case, this is the nature of modern day relationships. The woman sitting next to me at the workshop presentation, an oldster such as myself, kept saying that in her youth people were not like that, and I quite agreed.  It was different for me, of course, because I kept propositioning the boys in my school, and they were not about to enter into romantic relationships with me; they just wanted to get their rocks off.  It would be easy to say that there was no relationship at all in these encounters, but the funny thing about it was for the most part these guys were part of the social fabric of my life and familiars; they knew me well, tolerated me as an eccentric and there was a kind of comradeship, strange to say, that persisted over many years.  I think of that often in connection with a recent article in The New Yorker Magazine in which the author takes up the interesting fact that juveniles in the United States of America who engage in sexual relations are liable to be prosecuted as sex offenders for which they are held accountable throughout their lives.  I was appalled to read this, and thought back to the encounters as a fourteen and fifteen year old, the frenetic and strenuous urge to relieve the pressure of a teen aged hormonal surge.  Sex offender!  No way!  It was all fun; my cohort of boys never had enough sense of Christian sin to cast what we were doing into that Stygian gloom.  When I think back on that long ago time I hear Freddie Mercury's voice soothing me and sending me back into nostalgia with that song "Those Were the Days of Our Lives."