A ‘60s Rebel and Her Daughter Will Compare Notes in the Year 2000 : Alice Kahn

Guess I started in on her about 13 years ago, on the day she was born. “Someday, my dear daughter,” I said, looking into her glistening baby eyes, “someday you will be a teen-ager and you will rebel against me and say cruel things you don’t mean and make my life as much fun as a prison guard’s. . . . “ “No, Mama, no. I’ll love you forever,” the goo-goo face seemed to say. “I am your monster. I will do your bidding.”

And so the years went by: I reminded her daily, “This is going to turn sour.” She, by her every deed and word, a devoted monster, doing my bidding.

Then just about the time I began to believe we would defy the Mother-Girl Programmable Curse--whammo! Teen-age daughter from the pits of hell.

I suppose I should say that one reason I was so certain that things would turn ugly was my own teen-age rebellion. Without going into too much detail about what I did to my mother, let’s just say I had the woman walking around talking to herself, begging me to eat a meal at home.

You know you’ve got a parent disciplined when you step out on a religious holiday saying, “I’m going to the schoolyard to play strip poker with the boys and you can’t stop me. . . . “

Plus, I was not alone in my rebellion. I was part of a big, fat, sassy generation that wrote the book on rebellion. Or at least the screenplay. We cut our wisdom teeth on James (“Rebel Without a Cause”) Dean and Marlon (“Wild One”) Brando.

“What are you rebelling against?” the waitress asks Brando in the archetypal scene.

“What have you got?” he responds.

Around the age when previous generations had to grow up, get a job, get a haircut, my generation hit the late ‘60s. A reprieve. Whole new opportunities to torture our parents as we moved into our 20s. Jobs were for wage slaves. Growing up was for straights. Haircuts were for plastic people. We had a mass case of terminal coolness.

Then we had kids, and the party was over. “Just wait until you have kids,” our parents had said smugly, and now we know why.

But having tried every form of rebellion ourselves, we assume the I’m-so-hip-they-can’t-fool-me position toward our kids. That’s what today’s new, sensitive parents talk about: What are the latest trends in rebellion? What have we left for them?

What our kids love to do is look at pictures of their parents when they were hippies and point and laugh. You’ll see them getting out the family album with their friends, and somebody will howl, “Look at those bell bottoms!” followed by the kind of group laughter and choking that we knew only when we were seeking higher consciousness.

Here is how they’re rebelling: ankle-tight jeans. Guess? jeans. They are the antithesis of bell bottoms. By wrapping virtual tourniquets around their legs, they’re making a statement about how stupid they think we looked.

But we are old and wise. We have seen fads come and go. We have seen Marilyn in and Marilyn out. We have seen the rise and fall of the American hemline. We have seen ponytails go on women and come back on men at least twice.

So I have the following bet with my daughter. We will have lunch on New Year’s Day, 2000. If she hasn’t worn bell bottoms by then, I’ll pay. But if she has, she has to pay.

I plan to eat a lot.

Although she is certain she will win, there are already signs of weakening. Yesterday she came in and said, “I might want to get a tie-dyed shirt.” I began laughing.

“Not an ugly-hippie-rainbow Grateful Dead one,” she insisted. “A single-color pretty one.”

It’s the beginning of the end. Soon, she’ll be wearing pants with cuffs like a mermaid’s fins. Time, time, time is on my side. See you at Chez Expensive, sweetheart.