sent from: Esher High Street, Surrey, UK. destination: Marina Del Rey, California, USA

Tonight in class – the same person, who last week was unfamiliar with The Prodigal Son, expressed ignorance of the following tonight: West Side Story, Natalie Wood, Rebel Without A Cause.. from someone young raised in a Western Country, this is surprising, and my first reaction is incredulity. But, this is unfair, I shouldn’t be judgmental.

I don’t know how she was raised or in what conditions, and I remember how, when I first moved to the USA, how I was unaware of many things that are the cultural currency for people of a certain age – 70s/80s sitcoms – “Three’s Company”, “Who’s The Boss”, the casts of Saturday Night Live in its glory days, late night chat show hosts who are celebrities only in the USA (David Letterman, Johnny Carson), and events in the zeitgeist that people refer to in everyday parlance (“Are you drinking the Kool-Aid?”) ~ and when you tell people that horror of horrors, you were raised outside the USA and are therefore unfamiliar with things that are in everyone else’s background noise, I try to be understanding of other people’s pop-cultural blind-spots.