Hey, I wuz 'dere!

In the summer of 1996 I spent six weeks as a student at the London School of Economics. It was a nice experience, got some college credits, and enjoyed living in a foreign city (albeit one where people spoke English) on my own for the first and last time in my life (so far). 

My life in London during those weeks was relatively quiet -- I lived in a small room of a student residence and was either studying, writing papers, walking the streets, going to museums (falling in love with the paintings of Camille Pisaro), or reading books about Woody Allen and listening to the Velvet Underground. Also, I remember that this was the time and place where I learned that you could put oil and vinegar on turkey sandwiches (something I love to this day), that I could buy achohol legally at the age of 19, that the British smoke like crazy (every restaurant and bar and public space I went to was basically one big cloud), and that I might have been able to hook up with a really gorgeous Chilean lady but was too shy to do so.

Anyway, what I was not aware of, apparently, is that culturally 1996 was a big year in the UK -- as evidenced below by this interview with a journalist who calls 1996 the wildest year in the wildest decade. My experience in the UK in 1996 was far from wild but I wuz 'dere! at that time and it's weird to hear this guy give an in-depth historical perspective about a time and place that I remember well but wasn't involved in -- so close and yet so far.  

What I do remember quite clearly as that 1996 was a notable year for British filme: Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year and Trainspotting also came out giving the world Ewan McGregor and introducing the world to the Scottish heroin subculture. 

And that's not the only sense of deja vu I had this week. I was just listening to an interview with the actor Jon Cryer -- Ducky from Pretty in Pink, the not-Charlie Sheen character from Two and a Half Men, Superman's nephew in Superman IV and lots of other stuff. Anyway, in this interview he briefly mentioned that, when he was really young, he was an usher at Equity Library Theater on 103rd Street and Riverside Drive when he was a kid. That was hilarious because ... drumroll ... I also worked at ELT as a kid! I wasn't an usher, I worked concessions, but it's so crazy that we both worked at low-level jobs at ELTs in the 1980s. I only did it for a few months in 1989, years after Jon, but still ... I wuz 'dere! Again, so close and yet so far.