an un-tweeted weekend/yes, this is my cell phone and who wants to play sorry?
first thing is definitely first: thank you so much for your comments! and support!
better than flip-it slides
it was great to hear from various people about their cell phone experiences. here are some of the highlights:
I still remember the time my dad and step-mom were bargaining for a new car that came with one of those newfangled cellular phones. (I think I was like six or seven, maybe?) That phone was the paperweight they kept in the back seat for years…-r
my dad totally had a car phone which had a microphone hooked to the ceiling of the car. very high tech in 1992 (at least he thought so). however, as time wore off and the car got older, that thing seemed very outdated. he was so sweet, though. he just got a cell phone a few years ago and as late as 2003 he was still was trying to negotiate with the cell phone company to keep that thing hooked up.
kc says:
I remember when I saw my first “cell phone”, circa 1988. My dad’s friend had a “car phone” and it was a huge Zack Morris model, in a velcro case, with a cord attached to the base (the thing in the case). It was not cordless. I would BEG to be allowed to call my mom so I could talk while we were driving- so fancy!! Reception through a tin can and string was probably better…What did we ever do to quell boredom & awkward silence in public, pre-cell phone days? Oh yeah, I smoked…I actually remember wondering to myself, “what the hell is a ‘txt msg’???
Does your parents text? I taught my mom and my dad still hasn’t set up his voice mail.
My first experience with a cell phone was back in highschool – when I was the study hall TA. This “teacher” had a cell phone on her desk that she was very showboaty about answering. It had a looong antennae. Other than that, it was all about pagers.-a
n: I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was married in 2003.
i got my first cell phone when i moved to italy in 2002 because we didn’t have a land line (short anecdote: it was stolen a month later and the high school class i was teaching at the time chipped in to buy me a new one. i love naples). they were a bit ahead of us at the time-most of my friends there already had cell phones when my friends stateside were still using landlines. when i would come visit i would be cellphone-less which really wasn’t a problem until 2005 or so.
I realized the world was changing when you can sit at a meal with other people and quietly divorce yourself from the communal experience and check your phone and nobody cares. Well, I care, but I’m finding myself in the minority…I see people faced with the problems of life and seem unable to articulate themselves or process what’s happening. Will they seek out a friend or their phone?-s
i do that. i try not to, but i do that. i remember going to dinner with my sister in 2001. she had this super huge cell phone and was talking on it (to my recollection) loudly. i was so embarrassed.
s’s comment really got me. we talk about it a lot but do you think that not having had a cell phone as a child has allowed you to have a communicative asset to those ten years younger? are our parents at a disadvantage?
i feel we are in the middle of the shift from cell phones to smart phones which stirs up a whole other mess of questions.
i spent this weekend without a smartphone and more or less without my cell phone. this is like most weekends. on friday some of us went to grand teton national park to hear elk bugling. no elk but amazing stars. we had no need for technology as we saw the meteors and gazed up at the milky way above us, sipping our wine and enjoying the view… until someone pulled out their smartphone! which had a program to identify stars by merely pointing the phone in the direction of the constellation you wanted specified. way cool. but then i thought, oh wait, i remember my worn-out glow-in-the-dark constellation book that got worn out because i would look at a thousand times, studying it hard and then go outside to see if i could get them right. and for the rest of the weekend i spent in idaho at a wedding with other people from more or less this generation. no one was too busy texting or looking up info. beside, reception apparently wasn’t too great. and, in the evening while most of us spent our time around the campfire, the adorable flower girl played games on an ipad.
identifying stars right away, entertaining kids while parents socialize: good things. but times, they have changed. they are a-changin. big time. and yet, i still hold on to my often-dropped, 1 hour battery slide cell phone. i resist.
and unto the performance project. so, this little experiment is exciting and challenging me in many ways. as a performer, i’m starting to put things together. costumes (thanks, kc!), music, dances, statistics, quotes, interactive games mainly based on things that have come up in the last week or so from comments and emails. it’s going to be like vaudeville-meets-improv with a live twitter feed there will definitely be a madonna dance in there. can’t help myself). yet, if you had asked me what a live twitter feed two years ago i would have looked at you, bewildered by the terminology. yet this performance is a result of the need to answer questions about my generation via theatre and i’ve got to use these things that used to scare me in order to reach my goal. i want to connect us all together via our shared or perhaps conflicting perspective on what shapes us. i am driven this dream of making a rockin interactive performance that helps us examine the last three decades of our lives in a focused, poignant and humorous way. in order to do that and to weave this web of awesome people (thanks, people) i am using methods which mostly didn’t exist in my world 15 years ago. and in this desire to challenge myself as to how far i can go outside of my comfort zone with things like facebook, twitter (live feed-whut?), this blog and the upcoming website, i often feel like i am frying my brain.
for the record-creating a show with the help of others (many of them unknown to me) and many technological advances (most of them new to me), : a great thing. what has been really interesting is that the first thing that people chose to comment on about the 1979 generation was technology. we are kind of the “last generation” to not grow up with technology. the first time i used a cell phone was during my senior year in college. i tried to walk and talk and looked like i was drunk (i wasn’t, really!). we used to love to check our dorm phone messages while procrastinating in the library.
creating a show without having a smartphone yet using all of these newish technologies at a desktop computer: difficult, not impossible.
so, people, let’s continue this discussion of technology, shall we? let’s talk about video games and board games. i’ve had so many great suggestions and comments about pop-culture, politics, economy and globalization but i would love to hear about other experiences with video games, arcades, atari, monopoly and chutes and ladders, go fish. do kids still play these games? what other games (hide and seek, whatever) did you play and when did you start playing video games at people’s homes? do you still do that?
thanks again for all of your comments!
-a
project1979 
If you’re going to be doing dance moves, PLEASE include the “Roger Rabbit”. Probably one of the dumbest “dances” to ever be performed, but it so takes me back to middle school.
We played Monopoly a lot when I was a kid. Nowadays I cringe at the thought of a mind numbing couple of hours being a greedy rat, but it was sooo fun back then. However, we had 3 tv stations when I was a kid and didn’t have cable until I was a bigger kid, so what else was there to do? We also played Old Maid, Sorry, Uno, Memory, and we had a Wheel of Fortune board game, too. Outside games included “manhunt” (hide and seek in the dark and in the whole neighborhood… I bet our neighbors hated us).
Heaven was getting to play Ms Pacman at Pizza Hut on the their giant table top arcade. It had booth seating all the way around it, you know, so a crowd could gather to watch you eat pellets and run like a little bitch from ghosts named Pinky. (I was usually a watcher, being a younger sibling.) I still love Ms Pacman. A few years ago we bought (for ME) a joystick thing that plugs into your tv loaded with classic versions of Pacman on it. I LOOOOVE IT. Super Pacman is the best one; it’s Pacman character has faster speeds. It was hilarious introducing Pacman (any variation) to my oldest child (8yo), who is a PS and Nintendo ds pro. The simplicity of it was shocking to him, but he likes to play it every now and then. When I let him, haha!
I still own a SNES and still love to play Super Mario 3. And Tetris and the Legend of Zelda. If I get on a Sim City (the original) kick I will stay up late like a crackhead and develop cities like my life depends on urban growth. I’m not so good at PlayStation games, but haven’t really given them a chance. I do like to play the ds, though.
With my older child, I try to play board games a lot, b/c I don’t want video games to be the only source of fun. We like chess, Scrabble, Trouble, Trivial Pursuit family, Sorry, Uno, and Life. I know they like to play chess, Trouble, and Uno at school for rainy recess days.
yes, yes i will do the roger rabbit! actually, i just did it at a wedding…what do you think about doing a roger rabbit dance contest during the show? and do you remember and other dance moves we should include?
i never had a super nintendo, however when my sister got a nintendo after working at her first job (hungry howie’s) she would occasionally let me use it. i loved duck hunt!
then she got a game boy. loved that tetris. i feel like they include pacman game is totally for our generation! for parents who are still wanting to play.
do you happen to have any pics (from any time in the last three decades) that you’d like to show on the site? they can be of school, home, baby pics, pictures of graduations, your first car or even things like old buildings being torn down or anything of a political/social/cultural nature?
love your comments!
As for kids today…I am a nanny for a two year old who knows how to use an iPad and iPhone better than I do.
Granted, games are still out there, but they are shadowed by the looming technology giant of cellphones, computers, iPads, etc.
really? a two year old? whoah. i don’t know why but that scares me a bit. do you remember when you saw your first iphone? or ipad? do you have one now?