Garden Party

Garden Party | Oscar Nominated CG Animation | Short of the Week
Short of the Week
Shades of Tony Montana. The animation is very realistic, almost perfect, but there are a couple of  instances where the frogs exhibit some human behavior. It's not much, it's just a subtle motion of the head or body, but it rings false, which is all I needed to convince me that it was an animation, not some the work of a crazed naturalist camped out in a former drug lord's oasis of death.

Okay, that's one take on it, but you say 'Garden Party' and I remember Ricky Nelson's song:

Garden Party by Ricky Nelson 1972 Official | Stone Canyon Band | Original Lyrics in Description
Our Nostalgic Memories

It wasn't a big hit, and it didn't really connect with me, you know, not like a Beatles or a Led Zeppelin hit did, but the lyrics were kind of interesting and eventually, like a thousand years later, I looked it up and found out about what happened. When this song came out (1972) the culture war between the straights and the hippies was going strong. The Vietnam war and the associated protests were in full song. And I was kind of on the side of the hippies.

You go to school and you study all this stuff and you learn all these things, and what's your reward? You get to go to more school and learn more things. Or you can go to war and get yourself kilt dead, or worse. What the fuck kind of deal is that? Where's the new Chevy convertible? Where's the job that pays $5 an hour? (If you were making $5 an hour back then you could certainly afford a car, maybe not a new one, but a decent car could be had for a few hundred dollars. Yeah, Madison Avenue was painting a rosy picture, but you're eighteen and you step out of the house and you find it's a long way to the ground. No wonder people were pissed off and protesting.

There was something wrong with the straight world. I didn't know just what was wrong, but I knew it was stupid. They had all these rules and bullshit, and a lot of stupid, useless classes (anything that involved reading and writing). Math, the only subject that counted, was super easy. Entertaining even. (I think it might be genetic. None of my kids seems to have it, at least not to the extent that I do.)

But given that most people seem to have difficulty with math, I don't think we can say that freakish genetic mathematical ability was pervasive enough to lead to zillions of people protesting. I think there were other things wrong with the straight world, and other people, ordinary people, saw there was something wrong as well.

Fifty years later, I am thoroughly embedded in the straight world. And there are still things wrong. I think my biggest problem was I thought everyone else in the world was stupid. That's probably a common affliction amongst 19 year olds. I would have benefited from some real life lessons that I suspect I was protected from simply by my place in society. No soldiers in the streets, no bombs going off down the block, no bums on the sidewalk.

There's still something I am not connecting here. Or maybe it's because it's all so far away that it's all a little jumbled.

Update July 2022 replaced missing Ricky Nelson video.