Mimi was a teenager during the 1950’s, who lived with her older sister and parents in a middle class community in Forest Hills, New York.  Bob, Mimi’s father, worked as a beauty supply salesman, and her mother, Irene, was a housewife who also worked for her brother
designing and making children’s clothing. In her community, she was friends with every store owner and neighbor, and nothing changed.  At school, Mimi found a great talent in acting and dancing, and for eighth grade she went to a performing arts school in Manhattan. At her new school the teaching style was very different.  Classes had as few as eight students, and was more of a discussion than a class.  However, her favorite part of the day was lunch, when students would dance on the tables to swing music played by a band at the school.   The following year, Mimi found the work load to be to stressful, especially with the long commute, so she returned to a local high school.  She and her friends spent their time after school listening to music together, ice-skating, or roller-skating.  The trends of the time included sweater sets and felt skirts or ones that were flared or pleated.  Although she had left her acting school, her love of music remained.  She remembers being a teenager and going to the television show, the American Bandstand (see Music), with her friends.  Mimi’s parents were not strict about the types of music she could listen to because Mimi didn’t like rock and roll music or Elvis, and found swing music more fun.  She was also close with her family,
and enjoyed the safe feeling of her time, and felt no need to rebel.  I found that Mimi had been very sheltered from the outside world because when asked about the discussions in her school about current events, she said that there were none.  She needed to be reminded of the countless air raid drills, and the identification tags that had to be worn everyday to school, in case a bomb was dropped.  What she knew of the Cold and Korean War was minimal and had been learned by word of mouth.  Even the news programs on television didn’t give full information, they gave the world what they wanted to hear.  She then switched the topic back to music and her friends.  Mimi summed up her adolescence as being safe, because in the fifties there was a strong sense of community which she feels is lacking from today’s society.  The reason Mimi probably reflects on the Fifties as a safe and secure time is because most of it was spent sheltered from reality.