Quote of the Day (Tom Wolfe, on ‘Jersey Teenagers’ When First on the Loose in NYC)

“The first time people in Manhattan noticed the Jersey Teenagers was when they would come bobbing out of the Port Authority and move into Times Square. No one ever really figured out what they were up to. They were generally written off as Times Square punks. Besides the bouffant babies in their stretch pants, furry sweaters and Dick Tracy eyes, there would be the boys in Presley, Big Bopper, Tony Curtis and Chicago boxcar hairdos. They would be steadying their hairdos in the reflections in the plate glass of clothing stores on 42nd Street that featured Nehru coats, Stingy-Brim hats, tab-collar shirts and winkle-picker elf boots. No one ever seemed to notice how maniacally serious they were about their hairdos, their flesh-tight pants, puffy sweaters, about the way they walked, idled, ogled or acted cool; in short, how serious they were about anything that had to do with form and each other.”—American “New Journalist” and novelist Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), “The Peppermint Lounge Revisited,” in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)

The term “bridge-and-tunnel crowd” is believed to have first appeared in print in a December 1977 New York Times article, quoting Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell. But a dozen years before, Tom Wolfe had analyzed, with a sociologist’s exactitude and a zest all his own, the youthful contingent of this mobile brigade.

As I read the above passage, I did some quick math. The teens that Wolfe was describing, if they are alive today, would be grandparents.

Years earlier, when they had kids of their own, they had to endure with their adolescent girls the same ritual they’d tried out with their parents: i.e., “put those patient curls in your lips and tell Mother—you have to spell it out for her like a kid—that yes, you're going out with some of your girlfriends, and no, you don’t know where you’re going, and yes, you won’t be out late, and for God’s sake, like don’t panic all the time, and then, with an I-give-up groan, tell her that ‘for God’s sake’ is not cursing.”