The past always seems to be so…old. Previous styles, mores, customs seem to have vanished, replaced wholesale with an entirely new set of styles, mores, and customs.
That’s why we can snicker at ridiculous stuff like men with handlebar mustaches riding crazy bicycles and corpulent women vamping it up as if they were sex goddesses.
In thinking about the past, I still can’t decide if we’re basically the same as our ancestors or if we are completely different. The easier thought is that we are different; that they inhabited a different nation than us, a nation called 1913, 1945, 1864, or whenever.
Then I see something like the Kodachrome color film test girl from 1922, from Kodak’s blog called “A Thousand Words.”
We see a series of women, most of them looking very 1922. But the one who really bridges the gap between the ages is the woman at 1:11, in the green. Her clip lasts only ten seconds, but in that short time we see an awkward girl of perhaps 20 years old begin with a shy smile, turn her head, turn back to the camera with just a wisp of a sexy glower, and then smile again.
Ten seconds.
Unlike the other women, who were actresses and who knew how to act very silent movie-like, she didn’t know how. Who was she? Whoever, she was probably born around 1900 and died by 1980.
So, turn off the sound, hit Play, advance to around 1:11, and go back in the past.
