Went the Sock Hop last night, hosted by Joel Najman, the host of VPR’s “My Place” celebrating 25 years on the air.

Yes, there were girls on roller skates flying around serving hot-dogs. There were poodle skirts - I had never seen one in action, never realized how graceful, how tantalizing they were. There were kids, and hot rods parked outside, and the VPR ‘family’ and people asking each other to dance. The dance floor in the old Union Hall was ample and welcoming, and you could go hang out in the cool evening air on on the railing through the generously arched doors. It was a perfect summer evening from another time.

I wonder about the Fifties a lot. I have been listening to My Place for a lot of years now, at first because I had the radio on on a saturday night, after Prarie Home Companion. The picture that Joel paints of that time is interesting, and that 50’s rock-n-roll can even be enjoyable, given the right frame of mind.

It seemes, through the perspective of teenage rock, a mythical time, but, when I think of it, no more mythical than the sixties are to me, though, if you asked, I would say I was a child of the sixties. But, while the kids were doing be-bob in the subway entrances in the bronx, we had McCarthy, we had the start of the Civil Rights movement, we had the Cold War, we had Korea (anyone remember Korea), we had the seeds of Vietmam being sown.

It was an odd moment in time, when the US, triumphant from The War, flipped the production switch from armaments to consumer goods, when we could do no wrong, when our muscles, just having been flexed, were at their strongest. It was at this time that England put together the National Health Service. We put together suburbs, the red scare, and the teen-age culture that set the stage for the baby-boomers.