What are you old enough to remember?

[fancyboot]

Really 🧐

I was part of a study abroad program. 

[samhexum]

Just now, fancyboot said:

Really 🧐

I was part of a study abroad program. 

I was part of a "squeeze every last benefit out of Pan Am's incredibly generous frequent flyer plan in the last months before they went kaput" program.

[fancyboot]

No more ditto. Damn. 
I remember Pan Am going out of business while I was in Moscow. I booked my connection (in the states ) on Pan Am for Christmas Eve. I was scrambling in New York to make my flight on Delta. 
 

did you enjoy your time there?  
ps I was a GG fan back in 1991, too. 

[samhexum]

On 8/19/2023 at 9:13 PM, Rudynate said:

As a little kid, I used to do errands and chores for the neighbors for pocket money. When I got 75 cents, I used to love to go downtown to Newberry's and get an order of french fries and a ginger ale at the lunch counter.  The waitresses were all middle-aged ladies in waitress uniforms with white nurse shoes

They were probably all mid-30s, which seemed like middle age to you.

[fancyboot]

Huh? You lost me 

[samhexum]

18 hours ago, fancyboot said:

did you enjoy your time there?  

Immensely, other than the food.  The McDonalds and Pizza Hut in Moscow & the American hotel our guide took us to for postcards where we found Coke and Twix bars in the gift shop saved us from starvation.

18 hours ago, fancyboot said:

ps I was a GG fan back in 1991, too. 

“Dorothy, I’ve been talking to that good-looking reporter over there. He just got back from Russia. He told me a couple of very interesting things. It snows there in the summertime and they don’t have many attractive women. Do you realize what that means? When we go to Russia, I will have my pick of any man in the country and you can make a snowman in June!”
-Blanche

The press conference is about to begin as soon as Rose gets back from picking up the Cadets. As Dorothy explains this, Alexei from the Embassy refers to Rose as Dorothy’s daughter, and they realize that they think Rose is about nine years old based on the letter. Blanche and Dorothy rush to the kitchen to figure out what to do.

“We certainly can’t tell those Russians the truth.”
“Why not?”
“Because they will use it as a propaganda ploy to convince the whole world that all Americans are as dumb as Rose!”
-Blanche and Dorothy

Edited September 5 by samhexum
because he's bored as hell

[fancyboot]

Apt quotes. Especially love the first one. 
Ah yes, the food. Or lack thereof.  I lost so much weight over there. I was in Russia for 4 months, give or take. 
McDonalds was a blessing. I ate Thanksgiving dinner with two friends at Pizza Hut (the side where you paid rubles, not foreign currency).  Finding edible food was a minor miracle.  

I ate many lunches in cafeteria of the school where we studied. I was studying Russian since I didn’t really learn it well in college. 

[samhexum]

15 minutes ago, fancyboot said:

Ah yes, the food. Or lack thereof.  I lost so much weight over there. I was in Russia for 4 months, give or take. 
McDonalds was a blessing. I ate Thanksgiving dinner with two friends at Pizza Hut (the side where you paid rubles, not foreign currency).  Finding edible food was a minor miracle.  

The only thing edible in Leningrad was when our guide & our driver

(a company was trying to establish itself in Russia & we got a ridiculous rate.  I put the whole trip together and don't remember how I found them...  over the course of a couple of days my roommate would come home and I would tell her what the latest iteration of the trip was until I finalized a 19 day, 10 country [including day-trips and connection points] extravaganza with one car rental and one round-trip ticket for each of us and one short, cheap KLM flight from Helsinki to Leningrad where they upgraded us to first class because we were the only ones on the flight and the stewardess asked 'you don't need me to explain the emergency procedures, do you?'... and now back to my fascinating anecdote...)

took us to some beautiful old cathedral 1/2 hour outside town

(getting stopped for speeding along the way... we were joking we were going to be shot or taken hostage... and now back to my fascinating anecdote...)

where we were served delicious rolls and edible meat in a thick gravy that I ate through hysterical laughter because just as my starving roommate was about to dig in, a fly did a swan dive into the gravy atop her meat.  No, I didn't share.  She had her rolls.

In Moscow we treated them to lunch at McDs & dinner at the foreign currency side of Pizza Hut... they were impressed!

[samhexum]

17 hours ago, samhexum said:

The McDonalds and Pizza Hut in Moscow & the American hotel our guide took us to for postcards where we found Coke and Twix bars in the gift shop saved us from starvation.

voice of Sophia:  PICTURE IT...  RUSSIA, 1991:  Sam is looking at postcards on a rack at the front of the shop...  suddenly he hears a joyous voice from the back...  SAM!  THEY HAVE COKE!  THEY HAVE TWIX BARS!!!

Edited September 5 by samhexum
To maintain the incredibly high standards I have established here

[fancyboot]

I’m impressed you put together such a long trip.  You must have been channeling Dorothy.   What other countries did you visit?  Our group went to St Petersburg (the name had just changed) for a week. We took the midnight train there. 
 

Whenever someone in our group found a person selling something good (like Pepsi, or strawberry soda) that person would come back to the dorm and tell everyone.  We’d make the trek to the other side of the city and buy what we could. I could be seen chugging 4 12 oz Pepsis in one night.  
 

 

[Rudynate]

14 hours ago, samhexum said:

They were probably all mid-30s, which seemed like middle age to you.

Nah - they were middle-aged. My mother was in her mid-30s then and these ladies seemed older than her.

 

[+ Charlie]

Hmmm. I was also in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1991, when the tour guides kept huddling together  trying to figure out what was going to happen to their jobs.

[samhexum]

15 hours ago, fancyboot said:

When did you go to the Soviet Union? I went in 1991

 

2 minutes ago, Charlie said:

Hmmm. I was also in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1991, when the tour guides kept huddling together  trying to figure out what was going to happen to their jobs.

We got our visas in the mail the day the tanks rolled into Red Square in the attempted military coup.

[fancyboot]

The coup happened a month before I arrived. But I was wondering if I would end up going to Moscow or not.  By the time I got there things were calm. 

[+ Vegas_Millennial]

2 hours ago, Rudynate said:

Nah - they were middle-aged. My mother was in her mid-30s then and these ladies seemed older than her.

 

I thought mid-30s was the very definition of middle age.  If life expectancy is 76, then middle of that is 38.  So, mid-30s to early-40s would be middle age.  Hence why AARP membership begins at age 50, when someone is passed middle-age.

[Rudynate]

46 minutes ago, Vegas_Millennial said:

I thought mid-30s was the very definition of middle age.  If life expectancy is 76, then middle of that is 38.  So, mid-30s to early-40s would be middle age.  Hence why AARP membership begins at age 50, when someone is passed middle-age.

If you are insisting on a strict definition of middle age, I suppose that is true.  My understanding of middle age has been sort of "you know it when  you see it,"  beginning somewhere around late 40s to early 50s and transitioning to old age maybe in the mid to late-60s.

Edited September 5 by Rudynate
revise

[samhexum]

On 8/30/2024 at 6:17 PM, WilliamM said:

Ethel was best known for Broadway   certainly not a few episodes of a Batman 

Excuse me, but when you are destined for fame, you don't need 'a few episodes' to make an impression for the ages.

Ms. Zimmermann made ONE appearance as Lola Lasagna, and the legend was born...

 

[samhexum]

17 hours ago, fancyboot said:

Whenever someone in our group found a person selling something good (like Pepsi, or strawberry soda) that person would come back to the dorm and tell everyone.  We’d make the trek to the other side of the city and buy what we could. I could be seen chugging 4 12 oz Pepsis in one night.  

We had a different guide & driver in Leningrad & Moscow.  The first driver got stopped for the speeding ticket, the second was 1/2 hour late picking us up to get to the airport.  The parents of our Moscow guide (Katya Levitt, I still remember her name) schlepped four bottles of Pepsi across the city for us.  (beggars can't be choosers; at that point we might have drunk Mountain Dew)

 

17 hours ago, fancyboot said:

I’m impressed you put together such a long trip.  You must have been channeling Dorothy.   What other countries did you visit?  Our group went to St Petersburg (the name had just changed) for a week. We took the midnight train there. 

We took the train in the opposite direction & my roommate was surprised at the bathroom, as she was apparently expecting something at least the equivalent of Amtrak.

We were supposed to fly into Leningrad.  Pan Am dropped that direct flight and only had a 17 hour connection available.  Fuck That!  We flew into Helsinki, where my roommate walked through the door to the luggage area and immediately said "There's Gary Morris" (American country music singer/actor) who was at one of the 2 or 3 carousels.  We went to the hotel, slept, and flew out in the morning.

We flew from Moscow to Frankfurt.  They allowed up to 2 'layover flights' for each round trip ticket; this was one.  Our free ticket was into Helsinki and out of Paris so the only flight we paid for was the cheap 45 minute KLM flight from Helsinki to Leningrad.

We rented a car in Frankfurt and returned it in Paris 12 days later with 4008 KM (2505 mi) on it.  I don't remember it all & am too lazy to pull out the photo album, but I know we hit Prague, Vienna & Zurich along the way.

Another hilarious memory at her expense...  we actually got into a traffic jam on the autobahn and were hours late getting to Prague and she was DESPERATE to pee.  We were on a dark route, not a freeway-type road, and didn't know how long it would be, so we pulled over and she went down a ravine into the darkness.  Suddenly, CW McCall and the mighty convoy roared past, and she later told me she looked up and the car was illuminated in the headlights and was rocking back and forth because I was laughing so hard.

Edited September 5 by samhexum
just for the hell of it

[samhexum]

19 hours ago, fancyboot said:

Our group went to St Petersburg (the name had just changed) for a week. We took the midnight train there. 

I did the math (YAY @MysticMenace !) and I believe we flew out of Moscow (and boy were our arms tired!) about the time you were run out of town on a rail (I mean took the overnight train... yeah, that's it... the overnight train).

[+ WilliamM]

4 hours ago, samhexum said:

Excuse me, but when you are destined for fame, you don't need 'a few episodes' to make an impression for the ages.

Ms. Zimmermann made ONE appearance as Lola Lasagna, and the legend was born...

She was already famous,  Ira Gerswin  wrote songs for her

 

[+ WilliamM]

6 hours ago, samhexum said:

Excuse me, but when you are destined for fame, you don't need 'a few episodes' to make an impression for the ages.

Ms. Zimmermann made ONE appearance as Lola Lasagna, and the legend was born...

 

Ethel had her biggest hit in 1946 with Annie gennie get your gun 

[samhexum]

7 minutes ago, WilliamM said:

Ethel had her biggest hit in 1946 with Annie gennie get your gun 

That was the one in which she sang about her son coming out tomorrow, right?  That was a pivotal moment in Broadway history, as it marked the first time anyone had even considered that homosexuality was known about in the theater world.

[+ WilliamM]

1 hour ago, samhexum said:

That was the one in which she sang about her son coming out tomorrow, right?  That was a pivotal moment in Broadway history, as it marked the first time anyone had even considered that homosexuality was known about in the theater world.

It was  sun  not son 

[+ Vegas_Millennial]

1 hour ago, WilliamM said:

2 hours ago, samhexum said:

That was the one in which she sang about her son coming out tomorrow, right?  That was a pivotal moment in Broadway history, as it marked the first time anyone had even considered that homosexuality was known about in the theater world.

Expand  

It was  sun  not son 

And it was "Annie" not "Annie Get Your Gun".

My eye roll to @samhexum was a laughter eye roll.  I got the joke.

[MikeBiDude]

Was fed this online this morning…amusing.

I Regret To Inform You, But If You Remember Literally Any Of These 50 Things From Elementary School, You're Officially Old

APPLE.NEWS

---

It's the truth, Ruth.