Forty Years of Groovy Single Gals

I don't think of any of us who, in 1968, felt like rare kayakers pushing off from the known continent called You Had To Get Married Right After College could imagine that 40 years later there'd be a stiletto stampede to see the film poised to exponentially phenomenize the already-branded notion that single, sexual women are an enviable species. That's because back then -- when Joni Mitchell was elegizing her 15th St. half-floor-through in "Chelsea Morning," and Carly Simon was moving into the Murray Hill walk-up where, she's said ,"I hated to sleep alone and because it was the Sixties I never had to," and Carole King was leaving a New Jersey tract house and husband for sexy Laurel Canyon -- we were just a few years away from novels (not just Rona Jaffe's but Keroauc's) that painted unattached female non-virgins exactly one color: desperate.

What would those first-generation Quixotes -- the Girls Like Us, if you will -- have done if, in 1968, they'd accidentally (bad Owsley?) time-zoomed to some strange America where guys typed, huge corporations ("Google"? "Yahoo"?) had been named by Wavy Gravy, and music rebels preened on red carpets like Rock Hudson and Doris Day. And: What if today's Blackberried, 401-k'd babes, crackling-with-self-referential jargon -- the Sex and the City-ites -- were tasked with devising a Power-Point imagining template for their quaint, Qaunt'd foremoms in their exposed-brick lairs.

Here -- along the lines of a French/English, English/French Pocket Webster's -- is a brief two-way translation, just in case.