Authors note: This is the first of a series of stories based on events during the 1970's. Though these stories can not be properly called historical, nor can they be called fiction. Rather they are distilled memories of my life and the life of friends and family during those heady days between the sexual revolution and the backlash of the 80's. So they fall into the Hollywood category "based on a true story". A factual framework has been filled with details that are fuzzy memories at best, hopefully making an entertaining story.
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Brenda was the thirty-two year old mother of three. Until last year, maybe even six months ago, that had been her whole view of herself. Sure she was house-wife, church member, even garden club president, but still the overarching feeling was that her life revolved around being a mother of three. To be honest, she loved being mom and her life had been busy and she had felt fulfilled. She had even resisted when her husband suggested that with their youngest in school she should go back to college and finish her degree. She'd dropped out when just before she gave birth to their first, she had been twenty one and she had almost finished three years of an elementary education degree at Baylor. She had first just skipped one year after Will was born, intending to go back and finish before they, but, things happen. Only rarely did it bother her that she did not finish, but she loved every minute being a mother. When Connie, their youngest, started first grade last year she'd begun to think about finishing and it had taken her the rest of that year to get through the process of resuming her education.
It had been 1963 when she had left Baylor, a (then) conservative Baptist college. It was now the fall of 1973 and the world was very much a different place, especially on the campus of University of Texas at Arlington (UT-A) where she was now enrolled. She had decided to pursue anthropology rather than to continue to train to be a school teacher. Her classes in the fall had proven not to be a great academic challenge, she had always been a good student, but her core values were challenged, no assaulted, nearly every day in class by her professors. She had taken a philosophy course, a sociology course, a literature class and a course in world religions that first semester (in addition to introduction to statistics and Ancient Eastern History). Literally every day something about her religious views, her moral views or her political views were challenged. For the first few months she resisted, and finally, in late October she went to her Philosophy teacher, a Dr. Valerie Driscole, and poured out her concerns. She'd told her she wanted to continue school, but did not like her values being attacked every day. Dr. Drisole's response was kind, direct and changed her life.
"Brenda" she said quietly "I can't tell you what to believe, but what I can tell you is that if your beliefs are worth having they will stand up to an honest intellectual examination. You are a bright woman, a very bright woman from what I've seen, so rather than shutting off the challenges to your beliefs, take this as an opportunity to affirm what you believe by subjecting them to the challenges your teachers are giving you. If you are right in your views, they will easily stand up to scrutiny, but you to be intellectually honest you must be willing to accept if you find your views do not stand up to the test."
Brenda had taken that challenge home and then back to class the next day. Sitting in Sociology she, for the first time, really considered what Dr. Hughes, had to say, though it was very much different from what she'd been thought.
By the end of the first semester at UT-A, she knew deep in her heart that her Southern Baptist view of the world was not passing the instinctual challenge very well. She didn't say anything to her family, but to a few friends she'd met in class she begun to open up. She surprised herself that over the four weeks between semesters, she found her self more comfortable going out with her new, younger, college friends, than her friends from church or the Garden Club. When her children were also out of school it was easy to go back to her old lifestyle, but on the Monday after New Years, when the kids were back in school, she called up Millie and they had lunch.
Millie had been in two of her classes in the fall semester, and like Brenda, she was a little older than most of the other students and they had hit it off right from the start. Millie was unlike anyone Brenda had ever known in any sort of personal way. Prior to her starting school, just Millie's appearance would have been enough to keep Brenda at a distance. Until the heat had broken in October, she wore the same ratty, very short, cut-offs and the same two or three little halter tops nearly every day. In the fall she went to a couple of equally worn hip hugger, big bell jeans and tee-shirts and when it was cold as navy pea-coat. And from what Brenda could see, she didn't even own a bra; just letting her, not-insubstantial, boobs just hang out there. On top of that, she was Jewish. That would have been enough on it's own to make her exotic.
Brenda, for all her conservative views, was very sociable. Her winsome personality coupled with her natural physical attractiveness, had always made sure she was never a wallflower in any group. By the third week of class she was a regular member of the lunch group which was mostly girls ten years Brenda's junior.
Millie, however, was in her late twenties, so just a few years younger than the others and that, along with the fact they shared both a Monday-Wednesday-Friday class and a Tuesday-Thursday class and they were both returning to college after a long hiatus in their schooling was what initially brought this unlikely friend into her life.
Millie was very talkative and all too glad to talk about herself. Like Brenda, she'd been a middle-class suburbanite and went off to college naive and, as she liked to say "with a head completely devoid of reality." She'd left her home in upstate New York in the fall of 1967 to study psychology at University of Buffalo. By the spring of her sophomore year she was a sophomore the naive eighteen year old had become a radical twenty year old. The campus riots in March and the violent police retaliation had pushed her firmly into a full fledged radical and though she completed her second year at Buffalo, when summer came she left New York for ever.
While Brenda was busy raising her children in the early 70's, Millie was leading a very different kind of life. It was after a test in October that she gave this narrative. "I left New York and with my parents believing I was going on a study trip, I went to Europe. I was sure the US was soon to fall into anarchy and so I wanted to get away, and so I went to London, then on to the south of France. London was amazing. Unlike hippies here, in London they dressed up in amazing clothes, ruffles and colors and style was so in. It was all so fun, and for me, best of all they were apolitical. It was all about just letting go and having a good time. None of the heavy talk about the war or civil rights, just smoking hash in hookahs and making it with a new person, or two, every night. For like a month I just carried my back pack to one flat after another going from one party to the next. I don't think I slept in the same bed, or with the same guy more than two or three times from the first of June till I went to France at the end of July."
One of the younger girls at the restaurant table asked "Why'd you go, that sounded really groovy."
