As originally published on More.com
I was the generation that just missed the 60s.
I was ten when the Beatles were doing world tours and my guitar-strumming neighbor, a hip girl of 17 who babysat me occasionally managed to convince me that they were actually choppering right into her New Jersey backyard; it was dusk when I realized I'd have to do triage on my cool factor with my new girlfriends on the block. And I was 12 in 1969 when the draft lottery for the Vietnam War began. As a seventh grader in a private girl's school, I was aware that something momentous was up, but since I didn't really know any guys, I didn't know exactly what. Earlier that same year, said neighbor--who now wore very enviable ripped and patched jeans and had gotten a wispy hippie-type haircut--convinced me she was going to the biggest party to ever happen in a place called Woodstock. And I was just too--nah, nah, na na na--young to go.
So my cloistered suburban friends and I, desperate to glom onto what we felt were the fleeting fringes of a revolutionary decade, stayed home and played our ultra-groovy White Album and pinned pictures of Paul and John to our walls; our summer reading for French was, appropriately, Les Miserables, which we shared over our pink Princess phones. Too old to be ignorant of current events (Walter Cronkite was piped into every house at night), we were always longing to be even just five years older so we could sit at the adult's table and actually participate in worldly talk. I for one felt like I was always five minutes late to the dock, always watching the boat of history sail off into the sunset without me.
So when my friend Agapi Gold, a writer and spiritual cheerleader to many, including her blog-mogul sister Arianna Huffington, told me to throw over my desperately needed vacation at the beach with my family (water! Sun! my kids...what are their names again?), to come to the Democratic National Convention in Denver I had to say yes. "You simply must come, dahling" she said in her best Eva Gabor imitation. "It will be history!"
So I am off today to Denver to stake out More's place in this historical moment. I will be making More's voice heard wherever I can so don't forget to take our voter poll. Some of you have written in to answer my editor's note question in the September issue (see page 18) about what issues matter most to you in this election--and I will make sure that those ideas get heard. More will also be joining with the Huffington Post to help with their wonderful Oasis, where conventioneers can congregate--for massages, great food and conversation. See you there.
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