Solid Gold

Gold, gold, gold. Gold bars? Gold Medal? Gold Medal Flour? For the past few days I’ve been trying to think of what “gold” means to me. This was a challenging blog post. An image kept popping into my head and I kept trying to push it out. “Solid Gold”.

My formative years were made up of Nixon’s resignation, Carter’s election, the Bicentennial (I made a cute Betsy Ross). Dorothy Hamill won gold in Innsbruck - I had the haircut. The Summer of Sam, NYC blackouts, Reggie Jackson as “Mr. October”.

At the root of it all though, I am a child of the disco era. I went through elementary school with a 70’s soundtrack playing in the background.

My siblings and I would perform skits to ABBA. We lip-synched and threw in some in some dramatic moves to make it interesting. "Fernando" and "Dancing Queen" were favorites. The Village People, Donna Summer, and Gloria Gaynor played on the radio.

70's fashion can only be described as Solid Gold. Gold lame, gold platform shoes, gold hot pants. Think Saturday Night Fever. Think Bee Gees.

One vivid memory I have of the 70's is my mother's 'Fro. Yeah, 'Fro. There's a photo somewhere buried in an album - not to worry, I have a perfect picture in my head. It was Christmas/New Year's 1975/76 and our whole family was on vacation with friends and Mom's 'fro was in fine form. Twice the size of her head, of course.

Mind you this is a woman from suburban Connecticut, wife of a doctor, mother to four children. Boy, that hair was smokin' - nice 'fro, Mom. Solid Gold.


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This post is part of a blog exchange. Always fashionable Flower Child can be found proudly sporting her thick curly hair around Washington, DC. When she's not dancing to disco music, she works as an evaluator of HIV/AIDS programs in developing countries. Today Vicky is over at Flower Child's place - ruminating on Silver. You can find more exchanges at The Blog Exchange.