I still feel very fancy and cool when I am in New York City and still find myself planning to move there and become all kinds of things whenever I visit.
You’ve mentioned this before (or one of your commenters) but Farrell’s ice cream in Southern California was it for me. This was back in the late 60s or early 70s. The waiters/waitresses wore costumes (that remind me of The Music Man) and they made a huge deal about serving the Zoo!
I hadn't thought about Farrell's in years until it came up on a thread here a few months ago. There was a Farrell's at the Chicagoland mall my best friend and I were dropped off at multiple times by one of our moms (and picked up by the other, after we had spent our babysitting money.) I remember the 1890s style piano music...
Yes! Farrell's was a big deal in a lot of California childhoods! I feel like it came up a lot in comments in the essay about themed California restaurants? I need to go back and look!
I love this question. My answer is: Watching Chasing Amy in a movie theater in Providence, Rhode Island, with my mom and grandma. The movie theater had COUCHES. The movie seemed so cool and deep and edgy, in ways that I know it wouldn't seem to me now. It felt so special and formative and happened at the exact right age (I was 17).
There is NOTHING more decadent than a movie theater with a couch. Like I still very much feel that way! I remember seeing Emma (the Gwyneth Paltrow one) with my mom and her friend. I was 11 and I felt like I'd seen the other side of childhood- and it was wonderful!
Every summer from age 5-12 my family went on a camping trip to Yellowstone with several families in our neighborhood. Everything seemed so big and spectacular. I remember counting down the minutes until Old Faithful would erupt. My little self was in awe of the water shooting magically into the air. When I went back as a 30 something surrounded by crowds of people waiting for Old Faithful to do her thing the magic was gone. I wondered what the heck I thought was so cool about it. The eruption didn’t make up for the crowd and I could get out of there fast enough.
I never got to see Old Faithful before adulthood, and I wish I had! Because my experience was very much like your second experience - crowded and a bit of a let down. I loved the rest of Yellowstone but still wish I'd seen Old Faithful when I could have seen it...differently.
For me it was Renaissance Fairs - as a young teen I thought they were so fun and that the folks who dressed up were romantic, dashing figures. I thought it would be so wonderful to be an adult and have my fancy (sexy!) dress and go to the festival and date the jouster and flirt with the guy with a sword scabbard. I skipped them all through college and when as an adult with a real job I finally attended one, all the magic was gone. These folks seemed to be all a bunch of odd, overgrown theatre kids with not a dashing hunk to be seen.
I am 💯 the old overgrown theatre kid still going to the Ren Faire, and this is still true for me. It's like trying to call the magic back. I know I won't be successful, but maybe I can pretend for my kids' sake.
I secretly really want to go to a ball like they have at the end of Enchanted, because I really love dress up, I really love dancing, I really love theater. But I know if I ever went it would just fall flat? But maybe falling flat is better than not going at all? Someday I'll find out!
OKAY! THIS IS ME AND MEDIEVAL TIMES! I went a bunch as a kid and I was like, I cannot WAIT to audition to be the pretty princess who falls in love with the knight. And then I went back when I was older with some out of town relatives and I was like....ohhhhhhhh. well.
OK for me it was also on a visit to NYC the summer I turned 12 (and we did go to Serendipity, and it's also a formative experience) but it was the magazine stores in Times Square that did it for me. Floor. To. Ceiling. Magazines. I was used to one little shelf at Waldenbooks or the grocery store. It was epic, and I bought a million of them and read them all and then 10 years later I moved to NYC to be a writer.
Now there are hardly any magazines left (I was shocked at the airport this weekend by how few there were!) and all my writing is digital. Those stores no longer exist; I did go to the one remaining one in Times Square for a few years before it, too, vanished.
I really, really, really miss magazines so much. I only got to enjoy them as a kid - which was great, because my collages were off the charts. But by the time I hit adulthood, they were really on their way out. Because almost all my writing is digital, I keep trying to think of ways to bring it into the physical world, but printing it off just feels...Idk. Maybe I'll make a homeculture magazine for myself someday.
My Brigadoon is a literal Brigadoon, the musical of my senior year of high school. My one and only theatrical production of my high school years, the one brief period of time of about three months when I wasn’t employed since I was 9 years old, a time when I thought maybe I could have a “normal” adolescence when I wasn’t in survival mode.
I was wrong.
Anyway, Brigadoon is the perfect metaphor for NYC visits.
I have a few: the roller skating rink I hung out at in junior high, Lyons’s restaurant where my friends and I would go in high school for milk shakes and fries or mozzarella sticks, and school clothes shopping at The Wet Seal (are they still in business??). The skating rink and the Lyon’s are gone now, the rink is now a New Age church and the Lyon’s is a lovely Indian restaurant, but I did go back into both as an adult and felt both that I’d gone back in time and that I no longer belonged.
Wet Seal and mozzarella sticks were each their own kind of sanctuary for me. I never felt cool enough to actually buy anything from Wet Seal? But wandering through it did feel like a peek into another world. Mozzarella sticks though? Those I ate with abandon. And I miss how they used to taste! They've never, ever tasted as good as they did when I was a teenager. Totally me that's changed - not the sticks.
My 2 favorite restaurants are from when I was 9 and 14, and wouldn't be my favorites if I returned to them. The first was Lambert's Cafe near Branson Missouri. The entrees were great (or were to my younger self) and they also bring out free hors d'oeuvres, but the best part was when they brought out large, fresh rolls and threw them at anyone who wanted one. The second was a Mennonite family-style restaurant in Montana. The plate-passing aspect and freshness of the food blew my mind.
Fresh rolls play an outsize role (no pun intended) in my childhood memories of my favorite places. I loved the Chicken Dinner Restaurant at Knott's Berry farm because they brought you basket after basket of hot rolls with jam. DECADENT.
I grew up just outside of Boulder Colorado, so I have been to a lot of concerts and events at Red Rocks. Dave Matthews, Rave on the Rocks, sunrise Easter services, so many incredible memories. And to be clear, the space is still much the same, because it's an outdoor ampitheatre.
But twenty years ago, you parked in the gravel, walked up the hill to the turnstile, met thirty new friends and bought your drugs on the way, and then put a blanket down on your bench. It's all paved now, and there's significantly more fanfare, and your snacks have to be in plastic bag, and your water bottle has to be sealed. It just feels like so much more work, somehow?
I totally understand this transformation, so many of my beloved places have undergone some version of it over the past fifteen years. It's weird when the place changes - not just me. Feels sadder somehow.
I grew up outside of Boulder too, but longer ago than that. I went to Red rocks in the late 1970's for a Little Feat concert that I ended up sleeping through (my husband was horrified I'd missed it when I told him this story). I was exhausted and I'd driven co-workers from The Broker Inn restaurant to the concert because I had a station wagon (my first car, a 66 Ford).
My high school French class had our annual outing to La Caille restaurant. We talked about it for months leading up to the field trip. We'd plan out our fancy outfits, practice our French, and listen to the boys talk about their excitement in seeing the costumes waitresses would wear that accentuated their breasts. On the day we finally went, we all boarded the bus and took the long drive (in retrospect, it must have been only 20 minutes), and arrived to the most gorgeous gardens and the most beautiful building I'd ever seen. We saw peacocks and walked on curved bridges over ponds. We ate escargot and the most luxurious mashed potatoes I'd ever had.
I've returned to La Caille twice as an adult, and it is beautiful (though the food has much to be desired, and thankfully, the waitresses are no longer required to wear busty French dresses). But the magic of going as a young teen high on hormones and low on real-life experiences will never be replaced.
WAIT I WENT TO LA CAILLE MY FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE!!! My friends took me for my birthday. And I thought it was the fanciest place in the world. The whole night was actual magic. I went back just five years later and I could see it was...not magic. Probably never had been. But I still love that memory.
for me it was CBGB's in NYC in 1976 and 77. I dressed in a black swirl skirt and white blouse, i looked like i was 12 (but really 16) and walking in there was like a dream, an exciting and wild scene - it was all about the music - i went about seven times in from out on the Island with a friend who was 22 - oddly enough no one bothered me or us, nor did i ever feel 'unsafe' - it was golden bubble of delight, even walking back down the bowery to catch the subway to penn station was un-eventful - tho the streets were pretty mean in those years in the city, esp at night. the place is gone now, forever fled....what a place! (I saw The Shirts, talking heads, and bands i never learned the name) - maybe it helped i was sober every time....straight-edge
Gorgeous, heartbreaking Harper's Bazaar article, Meg. Thank you for writing it.
Perhaps this is common among marching band nerds... but the magical teen hangout was Applebee's on Friday nights after the football games. It felt so hip, so independent, to go there with some cash from babysitting gigs, hitching a ride from a junior or senior or driving myself and some friends, and ordering an appetizer. It was actually a little much for me, too, but the times I went felt like I was in on some secret of coolness. In retrospect, I'm sure the waitstaff hated these nights and I feel quite bad for them 😂
I felt this way about Mimi's at that age. Just walking in with my little overstuffed wallet and ordering a club sandwich and Diet Coke? WAS THERE ANYTHING MORE SOPHISTICATED?!
For me it's two different diners, Dempsey's and Queen City. They're both closed now, but my friends and I used to go after school, theater or band rehearsals, football games, or whenever we didn't have anything else to do. We'd all order coffee and various other things and just hangout. Those that smoked, did. (you could still smoke inside in the mid/late 90s PA). There'd be these ongoing rambling conversations and running jokes and, damn, life was really good even when it was tricky in ways that only highschool can be.
It really is. Everyone is trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be and it's almost magical. But I also remember how tricky it could be to navigate and... I just want to hug all those teenagers and tell that it'll all be okay.
I AM SO GLAD YOU ARE HERE! Now that Substack has announced Notes, more on that soon, I am leaving the bird app except to post my work there. But no more social interaction. I just can't keep feeding it. So I am really grateful for this space!
I still feel very fancy and cool when I am in New York City and still find myself planning to move there and become all kinds of things whenever I visit.
Oh my, Laser Quest held such mystery and excitement for me as a child! I was convinced I could maybe be a part of the cool kids there.
LASER PLACES FELT SO SPECIAL. Like WHO KNOWS WHAT CAN HAPPEN IN A PLACE LIKE THIS. hahaha. I'd completely forgotten about those. I'm dying!
You’ve mentioned this before (or one of your commenters) but Farrell’s ice cream in Southern California was it for me. This was back in the late 60s or early 70s. The waiters/waitresses wore costumes (that remind me of The Music Man) and they made a huge deal about serving the Zoo!
I hadn't thought about Farrell's in years until it came up on a thread here a few months ago. There was a Farrell's at the Chicagoland mall my best friend and I were dropped off at multiple times by one of our moms (and picked up by the other, after we had spent our babysitting money.) I remember the 1890s style piano music...
Oh my gosh, was there ANYTHING more grown up feeling than being dropped off at the mall by a mom? THE FREEDOM.
Yes, Farrell's!!! We had one in Scottsdale Mall (South Bend, IN) when I was a teenager, and it was the BEST place to go!
I love this so much! Like, I LOVED going to the mall with my friends. I felt so grown up walking around with my little mini backpack on.
Yes! Farrell's was a big deal in a lot of California childhoods! I feel like it came up a lot in comments in the essay about themed California restaurants? I need to go back and look!
I love this question. My answer is: Watching Chasing Amy in a movie theater in Providence, Rhode Island, with my mom and grandma. The movie theater had COUCHES. The movie seemed so cool and deep and edgy, in ways that I know it wouldn't seem to me now. It felt so special and formative and happened at the exact right age (I was 17).
There is NOTHING more decadent than a movie theater with a couch. Like I still very much feel that way! I remember seeing Emma (the Gwyneth Paltrow one) with my mom and her friend. I was 11 and I felt like I'd seen the other side of childhood- and it was wonderful!
Every summer from age 5-12 my family went on a camping trip to Yellowstone with several families in our neighborhood. Everything seemed so big and spectacular. I remember counting down the minutes until Old Faithful would erupt. My little self was in awe of the water shooting magically into the air. When I went back as a 30 something surrounded by crowds of people waiting for Old Faithful to do her thing the magic was gone. I wondered what the heck I thought was so cool about it. The eruption didn’t make up for the crowd and I could get out of there fast enough.
I never got to see Old Faithful before adulthood, and I wish I had! Because my experience was very much like your second experience - crowded and a bit of a let down. I loved the rest of Yellowstone but still wish I'd seen Old Faithful when I could have seen it...differently.
I agree. The crowds, the built-up spaces to funnel and hold them... the magic is gone
For me it was Renaissance Fairs - as a young teen I thought they were so fun and that the folks who dressed up were romantic, dashing figures. I thought it would be so wonderful to be an adult and have my fancy (sexy!) dress and go to the festival and date the jouster and flirt with the guy with a sword scabbard. I skipped them all through college and when as an adult with a real job I finally attended one, all the magic was gone. These folks seemed to be all a bunch of odd, overgrown theatre kids with not a dashing hunk to be seen.
I am 💯 the old overgrown theatre kid still going to the Ren Faire, and this is still true for me. It's like trying to call the magic back. I know I won't be successful, but maybe I can pretend for my kids' sake.
Well I'll bet you're inspiring a new group of preteens/teens!
I secretly really want to go to a ball like they have at the end of Enchanted, because I really love dress up, I really love dancing, I really love theater. But I know if I ever went it would just fall flat? But maybe falling flat is better than not going at all? Someday I'll find out!
OKAY! THIS IS ME AND MEDIEVAL TIMES! I went a bunch as a kid and I was like, I cannot WAIT to audition to be the pretty princess who falls in love with the knight. And then I went back when I was older with some out of town relatives and I was like....ohhhhhhhh. well.
OK for me it was also on a visit to NYC the summer I turned 12 (and we did go to Serendipity, and it's also a formative experience) but it was the magazine stores in Times Square that did it for me. Floor. To. Ceiling. Magazines. I was used to one little shelf at Waldenbooks or the grocery store. It was epic, and I bought a million of them and read them all and then 10 years later I moved to NYC to be a writer.
Now there are hardly any magazines left (I was shocked at the airport this weekend by how few there were!) and all my writing is digital. Those stores no longer exist; I did go to the one remaining one in Times Square for a few years before it, too, vanished.
I really, really, really miss magazines so much. I only got to enjoy them as a kid - which was great, because my collages were off the charts. But by the time I hit adulthood, they were really on their way out. Because almost all my writing is digital, I keep trying to think of ways to bring it into the physical world, but printing it off just feels...Idk. Maybe I'll make a homeculture magazine for myself someday.
My Brigadoon is a literal Brigadoon, the musical of my senior year of high school. My one and only theatrical production of my high school years, the one brief period of time of about three months when I wasn’t employed since I was 9 years old, a time when I thought maybe I could have a “normal” adolescence when I wasn’t in survival mode.
I was wrong.
Anyway, Brigadoon is the perfect metaphor for NYC visits.
This is rough. I am so sorry. But I am so happy you had Brigadoon.
I have a few: the roller skating rink I hung out at in junior high, Lyons’s restaurant where my friends and I would go in high school for milk shakes and fries or mozzarella sticks, and school clothes shopping at The Wet Seal (are they still in business??). The skating rink and the Lyon’s are gone now, the rink is now a New Age church and the Lyon’s is a lovely Indian restaurant, but I did go back into both as an adult and felt both that I’d gone back in time and that I no longer belonged.
Wet Seal and mozzarella sticks were each their own kind of sanctuary for me. I never felt cool enough to actually buy anything from Wet Seal? But wandering through it did feel like a peek into another world. Mozzarella sticks though? Those I ate with abandon. And I miss how they used to taste! They've never, ever tasted as good as they did when I was a teenager. Totally me that's changed - not the sticks.
My 2 favorite restaurants are from when I was 9 and 14, and wouldn't be my favorites if I returned to them. The first was Lambert's Cafe near Branson Missouri. The entrees were great (or were to my younger self) and they also bring out free hors d'oeuvres, but the best part was when they brought out large, fresh rolls and threw them at anyone who wanted one. The second was a Mennonite family-style restaurant in Montana. The plate-passing aspect and freshness of the food blew my mind.
Fresh rolls play an outsize role (no pun intended) in my childhood memories of my favorite places. I loved the Chicken Dinner Restaurant at Knott's Berry farm because they brought you basket after basket of hot rolls with jam. DECADENT.
I grew up just outside of Boulder Colorado, so I have been to a lot of concerts and events at Red Rocks. Dave Matthews, Rave on the Rocks, sunrise Easter services, so many incredible memories. And to be clear, the space is still much the same, because it's an outdoor ampitheatre.
But twenty years ago, you parked in the gravel, walked up the hill to the turnstile, met thirty new friends and bought your drugs on the way, and then put a blanket down on your bench. It's all paved now, and there's significantly more fanfare, and your snacks have to be in plastic bag, and your water bottle has to be sealed. It just feels like so much more work, somehow?
I totally understand this transformation, so many of my beloved places have undergone some version of it over the past fifteen years. It's weird when the place changes - not just me. Feels sadder somehow.
I grew up outside of Boulder too, but longer ago than that. I went to Red rocks in the late 1970's for a Little Feat concert that I ended up sleeping through (my husband was horrified I'd missed it when I told him this story). I was exhausted and I'd driven co-workers from The Broker Inn restaurant to the concert because I had a station wagon (my first car, a 66 Ford).
My high school French class had our annual outing to La Caille restaurant. We talked about it for months leading up to the field trip. We'd plan out our fancy outfits, practice our French, and listen to the boys talk about their excitement in seeing the costumes waitresses would wear that accentuated their breasts. On the day we finally went, we all boarded the bus and took the long drive (in retrospect, it must have been only 20 minutes), and arrived to the most gorgeous gardens and the most beautiful building I'd ever seen. We saw peacocks and walked on curved bridges over ponds. We ate escargot and the most luxurious mashed potatoes I'd ever had.
I've returned to La Caille twice as an adult, and it is beautiful (though the food has much to be desired, and thankfully, the waitresses are no longer required to wear busty French dresses). But the magic of going as a young teen high on hormones and low on real-life experiences will never be replaced.
WAIT I WENT TO LA CAILLE MY FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE!!! My friends took me for my birthday. And I thought it was the fanciest place in the world. The whole night was actual magic. I went back just five years later and I could see it was...not magic. Probably never had been. But I still love that memory.
Love this! I remember sending some of my kids off to the same activity. They came home hungry 😂
for me it was CBGB's in NYC in 1976 and 77. I dressed in a black swirl skirt and white blouse, i looked like i was 12 (but really 16) and walking in there was like a dream, an exciting and wild scene - it was all about the music - i went about seven times in from out on the Island with a friend who was 22 - oddly enough no one bothered me or us, nor did i ever feel 'unsafe' - it was golden bubble of delight, even walking back down the bowery to catch the subway to penn station was un-eventful - tho the streets were pretty mean in those years in the city, esp at night. the place is gone now, forever fled....what a place! (I saw The Shirts, talking heads, and bands i never learned the name) - maybe it helped i was sober every time....straight-edge
This is so amazing and I am very jealous! A golden bubble of delight!!!
Gorgeous, heartbreaking Harper's Bazaar article, Meg. Thank you for writing it.
Perhaps this is common among marching band nerds... but the magical teen hangout was Applebee's on Friday nights after the football games. It felt so hip, so independent, to go there with some cash from babysitting gigs, hitching a ride from a junior or senior or driving myself and some friends, and ordering an appetizer. It was actually a little much for me, too, but the times I went felt like I was in on some secret of coolness. In retrospect, I'm sure the waitstaff hated these nights and I feel quite bad for them 😂
I felt this way about Mimi's at that age. Just walking in with my little overstuffed wallet and ordering a club sandwich and Diet Coke? WAS THERE ANYTHING MORE SOPHISTICATED?!
For me it's two different diners, Dempsey's and Queen City. They're both closed now, but my friends and I used to go after school, theater or band rehearsals, football games, or whenever we didn't have anything else to do. We'd all order coffee and various other things and just hangout. Those that smoked, did. (you could still smoke inside in the mid/late 90s PA). There'd be these ongoing rambling conversations and running jokes and, damn, life was really good even when it was tricky in ways that only highschool can be.
There is something about that space in life that is just....everything all at once.
It really is. Everyone is trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be and it's almost magical. But I also remember how tricky it could be to navigate and... I just want to hug all those teenagers and tell that it'll all be okay.
Meg - I left the bird and app and all of that nonsense (and some goodsense) behind, but I'm glad I can keep reading your stories here.
I AM SO GLAD YOU ARE HERE! Now that Substack has announced Notes, more on that soon, I am leaving the bird app except to post my work there. But no more social interaction. I just can't keep feeding it. So I am really grateful for this space!