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Initiation

Feverish potential

By greenchristinePublished 4 years ago 4 min read
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Ten was gangly white legs, in brown flared cords. It was 1977 in the Pacific Island nation known as Aotearoa, New Zealand. On weekday mornings I felt the wrath of Marilyn’s small, determined hands; brush strokes, tearing my scalp, in an effort to contain fuzzy blonde hair. Marilyn cared. Like a farmyard rooster, she broke our sleep, forced food down unwilling throats and groomed unruly bodies. Marilyn resided over the high gloss, canary yellow kitchen, with faux natural flooring and matching wooden handles. Marilyn also held court in the beige lounge room, between the olive, Sanderson drapes, cheap, European Old Masters and velvet upholstery.

Christine, Jennifer, and Caroline were her female chorus and crew; sisters in green plaid, woolen pinafores over white, cotton turtle-necks. We’d reluctantly set sail into the day, certain of our outward presentation, but trembling with inner chaos and trepidation. School was the task master, the constraint and the enemy. We were prepared, resentfully resigned, yet unwilling to surrender. At 9 am, an army band, broadcast over a crackling and distorted sound system, marched us in, to order and submission.

The New Zealand of my childhood was a little Britain that had recently lost its colonial umbilical cord, protected trade status. It was a time of change and transformation, a time of relinquishing the safety of protectionism, of joining a global market, of acknowledging and integrating civil rights. Worker’s rights were replaced by human rights: for women, children and Maori. The colonial (British) “kiwi”, one size fits all dream, of a nuclear family with a private family home and picket fence, was giving way to Maori and Woodstock hippie ideals of communalism, single parent individualism, and alternative expressions of gender, sexuality and life.

In the 70’s, Mellons Bay, looked like the kiwi dream; an enclave of white, nuclear families, on quarter acre sections, performing their versions of idyllic family order and perfection, overlooking a peaceful Auckland harbor. It was also the beginning of the end for that particular era of performance and delusion. The end of protectionism meant the end of a captive market and the steady income that kiwi farmers, manufacturers employees and beneficiaries, had taken for granted for forty years. New Zealand, like much of the rest of the world was recalibrating to a globalized world, making space for imports, immigration, new ideas, and better coffee. The conventional world was falling apart, and a new world was emerging, revealing previously under-seen people, under-heard voices, and under-considered values.

If my childhood weekdays were defined by the old world, and the militant formalities of school, weekends were an explosion of chaos and hedonistic freedom. I was ten. Life was new, exciting and full of immeasurable potential. Middle class meant enough parental patronage and pocket money to buy my own (precarious) identity: “off the rack” fashion, collections of “stuff”, tv shows, posters and vinyl records. My emerging kiwi identity felt familiar, both local and “global”, reflected in women’s magazines and television shows, shaped by a predominantly white, British/American (familial) global media, that asserted itself as the picture of modern worldliness and liberalism; a moral compass (like a Monarch or spiritual leader), but more insidious and influential.

And then there was Saturday Night Fever. The first movie soundtrack to be played on my bedroom record player or my cooler, wealthier, worldlier, friends’ Hi-Fi stereos. My imagination grew through exposure to sounds, stories, lives, histories, different from my own. Saturday Night Fever was my first R-rated movie experience. I was ten, and it felt subversive. It felt great! John Travolta exploring his body and sexuality on the streets, and in the clubs of Brooklyn, constrained and invisible in his Italian identity and menial day job, but free and visible at night, on the dance floor (in his nylon, body hugging clothing). Saturday Night Fever suggested that men might be other than traditional patriarchs; silent, impassive, militarized, talking heads. It suggested that they could be human.

To this day, Saturday Night Fever sounds like urban, creative, sensual, masculine, freedom. There was no real place for Saturday Night Fever or John Travolta in my 10-year-old kiwi, female, lived experience, just as there was no place for punk rock in my teenage years. And yet there it was, in my imagination, medicating every internal and external constraint; rocket fueling every adventure. As a ten-year old landmark, Saturday Night Fever was an initiation, a thought experiment in yet-to-be realized potential. It was a memorable vibrational template, for my yet-to-be lived emerging self.

humanity
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About the Creator

greenchristine

Creative writer and thinker, grad student, teacher, traveler. Curious about the human and geographic intersections of social, material, ecological, spiritual worlds. Committed to “Being the change”.

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