Last week's posting on the cultural and historical knowledge of today's college students struck a bit of a nerve with me. Maintaining the distinction between history and nostalgia is a bit of a passion of mine. Over the weekend I composed the following parody, which I hope will be accepted in the humor with which it is offered: ================================================= Interesting facts: (Developmental psychologists tell us that most children to not acquire an understanding of the larger world until around their tenth birthday.) In the year 2000, several million Americans will turn 65 and retire from the work force. With a new wealth of spare time, they will descend upon our museums and other cultural institutions. Are we ready for them? Born in 1935, they will have little memory or understanding of events taking place before 1945. Pearl Harbor will be as distant to them as the Lusitania or the Maine. They have no meaningful memory of Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo. Normandy, Iwo Jima and Auschwitz are just names on a map. They do not know who Lord Chamberlain is. They will never have voted for a President who was not subject to term limits. They will have never known a President Roosevelt. Mustard gas was outlawed after the Great War. They have never lived in fear of chemical warfare. On the other hand, they do not remember a world without nuclear weapons. They were not yet born in 1929, and not yet in school in 1939. The Great Depression is as significant to them as the Panic of '93. Their lifetime has always included radio, automobiles and electricity. They have never seen a corset, a hoop skirt, a stovepipe hat or a powdered wig. They do not know what a hoop skirt is. Tuberculosis was conquered when they were prepubescent. They are too young to have heard Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," Porter's "Night and Day," or Berlin's "White Christmas." Cubism, Dada and Surrealism are as irrelevant as the Baroque or the Renaissance. They have never seen "Gone With The Wind," "The Wizard of Oz," or "Snow White." Astaire and Rogers predate them; the expression "You dance like Fred and Ginger" means nothing to them. Babe Ruth hit his last home run the year they were born; Joe DiMaggio's ran his streak when they were six. They have never seen nor remember a World Series featuring the Washington Senators, the Philadelphia Athletics, the St. Louis Browns... or the Chicago Cubs. ============================================ OK, by now anyone who knew my Mother (b. 1934) is laughing hysterically, especially at the bit about the Depression having no effect on her generation. (Wanna bet?) The point is, our museum audiences include many groups that can be defined demographically -- age, sex, race, income, etc. But demographics do not directly translate into experience, understanding, or knowledge. Cultural and historical references, used judiciously, can be a powerful means for getting a point across. Museum exhibits and programs can neither assume that everyone in a group will get a particular reference, nor that no one will. There are some remarkably astute, well-read teenagers out there, as well as some pretty dense old folks. "People are people," as Depeche Mode said. Or was that Voltaire? Gene Dillenburg (born in Chicago in 1960, and making no apologies for either)