End-of-year madness / What did a '90s summer actually look like?
Were the 1990s the height of the do-nothing summer? One doubter examines the evidence
In case you’re wondering if the end of the school year is as hectic in France as it is in the United States, the answer is YES. June is packed with recitals and performances and parties of all sorts, and every event requires that you bring snacks or a gift or that you host a stand where kids throw darts at balloons, which means you alone will be responsible for a student permanently blinding his classmate if you’re not hyper-vigilant. The good news/ bad news is in France, the end-of-year parties are not limited to kids, because adults play sports and take art classes, too. This week I had two separate potlucks at my tennis club. I loved going to these parties, and I also did not love adding two more things to the calendar…I just knew I was going to mess something up. And I did.
My kids and I were sweating our way through a packed bus ride when I got a call from the teacher asking if we were coming to their recital. It was 6:07 pm. I said we were on our way, but I thought it started at 6:30. Nope! We got the time wrong. Cora was supposed to play first, but we were still about ten minutes away. The concert started without us, but luckily both girls were able to play later in the program, and weren’t too flustered. Unfortunately, my husband and his mom arrived just “on time,” for the wrong time, and missed the whole thing.
The only saving grace of France is there are no spirit days. My American friends’s kids have to dress in some special and annoying way every day in May. A French person would not know what a spirit day was, thank god. If I had to dye a kid’s hair with Kool-Aid or buy a special t-shirt in the next few weeks, I would lose my mind. Or I would refuse.
I’ve been seeing the ’90s summer or do-nothing summer trend happening in the US and I get it. Or, I get the concept of do-nothing… we have got to move away from the overscheduled summer “vacations” that kids have been subjected to the past few years and towards a quieter pace. Summer is supposed to be alternately lazy and full of adventure. My quibble is with using the 1990s as the reference point for the ultimate lazy and adventurous summer. “Our parents used to turn us out of the house after breakfast and we’d come home when the streetlights came on,” is something I’ve seen more than one person under forty-five claim on their social media. “Oh, come on,” I think. “You’re plagiarizing your grandma.” Either these people lived in a different decade or a way different neighborhood, because my ’90s summers— and ’80s summers for that matter—were filled with a lot of day camps, TV, and odd jobs. Kind of like now?
My French husband’s childhood summers were much the same, only the camps were super nice because they were subsidized by his mom’s workplace (where I was lanyarding and cooking potatoes in a fire, he was kayaking and horseback riding), and then he and his family would drive their RV around Europe for three weeks in August because French people actually get vacation time.
I’m so curious to know about other people’s summers—did anyone just play baseball in the street until dusk? Well, my dad did, but he was born in 1933, and he’s not around anymore. Anyone living?
Here’s a list of what my summers looked like. Before I wrote it, I thought it would seem depressing, but by the time I got to the end, it didn’t seem that bad. Nostalgia for drowning yellow jackets in a box of Hi-C* runs deep.
Ideas for your ’90s summer (with some ’80s influences):
Watch a scrambled version of “Clueless” on the HBO channel your parents don’t pay for. You saw the movie at the drive-in, so you’re not bothered by the black-and-white staticky image, and you just work on memorizing the dialogue. Go outside? As if!
Two weeks of free “day camp” at a nearby elementary school that is not your school. Learn how to draw comics from a disgruntled cartoonist and make beads out of dough from a hippie who tells you a story about how her late husband used to play practical jokes on her children, like putting citronella essential oil in their daughter’s bath to repel mosquitos. Learn that hippies don’t know what “practical jokes” are. Make the dough beads into a bracelet for your mom, which in two weeks will turn to green mold.
Decide to work on your basketball skills. As an only child who’s home alone, you have no one to play with, but you gamely grab your ball from the garage and use your neighbor's hoop at the end of the cul de sac to practice free throws.
Stay up until 1 am watching “Bewitched” on Nick at Night and then wake up after your parents have gone to work and eat cold cereal in the company of “Leave it to Beaver.” Leave the TV on for “Little House on the Prairie” even though it’s way annoying.
My summer host family
Spend a week babysitting a kid from church. Make decent cash playing hide and seek (where you find a gun under the bed), going “exploring” (over the woodpile, through the hedges, and face-first into spider webs), and trying to understand how her older brother could spend all day watching the OJ Simpson trial when “Saved by the Bell” is probably on TBS.
Sleepaway camp! The kids on TV have cabins and canoes, you sleep outside on a folding cot, underneath a (mandatory!) mosquito net. Morning activities include lanyard making, leatherwork, and archery. Afternoons are spent at the ice-cold, algae-lined, but at least enormous pool. Start and end each day around the flagpole, where you sing camp songs, say multiple pledges, and learn that if even a corner of the flag touches the ground while your group is folding it, it must be burned. (One time this actually happens, and everyone gasps, and the flag is not burned). Campfire features a “gossip box” (perfect for gentle sexual harassment and bullying) and lots of rounds of “chubby bunny” where by some miracle no one ever chokes to death.
Babysit the neighbor's kids for a week. Get paid next to nothing to read your book on the couch in a dark living room while the kids play video games for 8 hours straight. Try to get kids to do something other than video games by bringing everything you need to make chocolate chip cookies. “Great!” they say. “Tell us when they’re done!”
Parks & Rec day camp. Main activities are jumping off swings at the playground; 2-hour long, 50-kid large games of capture the flag, daily walks to eat lunch at the local beach, where you try to drown yellow jackets in your Hi-C juicebox, and a daily trip to the convenience store to buy candy.
Decide you will finally beat Bowser in the final level of Super Mario Bros. Fail, give up forever, and switch over to the TV to look for good reruns.
Expensive day camp! Over the course of four weeks somehow do all of the following: swim every day, learn to drive a go-kart and get your “license;” write, rehearse, and perform elaborate plays and sketch comedy; care for and play with a collection of pets that include rats, guinea pigs, and rabbits; take field trips to the aquarium, the arcade, an amusement park, and the world’s coolest playground. After a couple years of this, your parents will have burned through all their disposable income only for you to get really into rats-as-pets and are quite happy for you to go back to watching “I Love Lucy” all summer.
Read all the Babysitter’s Club Books, again.
Try to convince your mom how good the beef jerky from the Ron Popeil food dehydrator will be, and don’t forget to point out how your extra watermelons will never go to waste! Your mom asks, “If you dehydrated a watermelon, wouldn’t you just get, like, a teaspoon of pink sugar?”
Swim lessons, swim team, slip-n-slide, water balloons, sprinklers, hoses that burn you when you pick them up and spray you with boiling water then freezing water. Beach.
Proof that 80% of what you need for an ’80s summer is a garden hose and too-small swimsuit 
same for ’90s If you’re fifteen, then your friends in the class above you finally have cars! Unfortunately, they all have summer jobs to pay for their cars. You can catch a ride with Eric to the pizza place, but you’ll have to either walk home or hang out for five hours, because he’ll be busy grating mozzarella. No, he can not give you a free pizza.
If you’re sixteen, then you finally have a car! Drive it every day to the county health office where you’ll spend six hours filing backlogged medical records while listening to the same five CDs on your Discman. You’ll know the lyrics to Zoot Suit Riot better than you learned all the lines from Clueless.
*What is with the trend of hyphenated, consonant-focused sugary drink names? SunnyD (Sunny Delight). These drinks were developed in the 1920s-1960s, so this trend had a really long life
Next week I’ll be writing about what it feels like to anticipate coming back to the US this summer…to shore myself up, I went on a little trip down memory lane