Homebound: What are people thinking putting their high school portraits on Facebook?

Yearbook and graduation program. / Getty Images/iStock/Comstock Images
Yearbook and graduation program. / Getty Images/iStock/Comstock Images

Editor's Note: Times Free Press columnist Mark Kennedy is writing an occasional column, Homebound, about his family's social-distancing experiences.

We may look back at last weekend as the moment society cracked.

For some reason, Gen-Xers and Boomers decided to post their high school portraits on Facebook to "honor 2020 graduates."

Welp. Didn't see that coming.

So how does a 60-year-old person posting an old portrait honor the graduates of 2020? If there was ever an "OK, Boomer" moment, this is it. This is the "me generation" banging on the door of senility.

I chalk it up to coronavirus-induced hysteria, marked by a glaring lack of self-awareness. (It's sort of like the woman at the grocery store - true story - who used a Clorox wipe to de-germ a pack of cigarettes.)

Since I have an 18-year-old son, I decided to ask him how he felt about this heartfelt tribute.

"What?" he said.

My point exactly.

To him, this seemed about as sentimental as body odor.

Also, the chances it will reach its intended audience is vanishingly small. Posting a tribute to teens on Facebook is like putting a note in a bottle and dropping it in the middle of the ocean.

If you really want to honor a high school senior, send them 100 bucks on Venmo.

One of the unintended consequences of this squirrelly Facebook effort is that it pretty much shuts the books on the question: Who had worse hair, kids of the '60s, '70s or '80s?

Scanning the photos, you can see remnants of '60s (close-cropped) and '70s (mop-top) hairstyles today. Meanwhile, the 1980s is clearly the decade of unfortunate hair.

Girls' hair in the 1980s is like hash browns at Waffle House: scattered, smothered, covered, chunked and topped. Some of the hairstyles look like the final volley at a fireworks show.

Meanwhile boys' hairstyles in the '80s drifted to variations of the mullet cut - a.k.a. the Tennessee Tuxedo Tail, the Mountain 'Do or, my favorite, the Wartburg Weatherstrip.

The 1970s, on the other hand, gets the award as the ugly-tux decade. What was with those powder-blue jackets with velvet lapels? They look like they were designed by a deranged casket maker.

My guess is that all this posting has to do with Boomers coming to terms with their mortality. What better way to cheer yourself up than to post pictures of yourself at peak physicality.

After a day of this, it seemed like people were finally in on the joke. One of my Facebook friends posted a picture of Gollum from "Lord of the Rings"; another pretended to be George Clooney.

It should go without saying that I won't be posting any high school photos. At 18, I looked like a cross between James Dean and a Shetland pony.

***

Sheltering in place has allowed our family to watch more movies than normal. I circled back to watch Tom Hanks in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." I had missed it in the theaters.

In the movie, Tom Hanks plays Fred Rogers, the host of the beloved PBS kids show "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." The plot of the film involves Rogers' interactions with a character named Lloyd Vogel, a writer who is doing a piece about the TV icon for Esquire magazine.

Based on a true story, Rogers befriends Vogel during the course of a multistage interview and helps him reconcile with a father who abandoned his family when the writer was a child.

In a scene near the end of the story, Rogers visits Vogel and his father, who is on his deathbed. At one point, Rogers breaks an awkward silence with piercing moment of clarity.

If I could leave your family with one thought this week, it would be this Mr. Rogers quote.

"Anything that's human is mentionable," Rogers says, "and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary."

Amen to that.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.

View other columns by Mark Kennedy

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