PARTING SHOT CELEBRATING THE PREVERSARY OF THE NEW NOSTALGIA

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy New Decade, and Happy Super Bowl. By the way (and this is written in early December), if and only if Joe Montana stays healthy, I predict the 49ers will eke out a 37-34 win over the Broncos on Super Sunday. I also predict that in the Nineties, our national nostalgia binge will build until, in the words of Frank Zappa, “people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took,” Of course, some of us remember how good nostalgia used to be, but that’s not the point. Nostalgia is the disease, and anniversaries are the leading symptom.

Time was when only the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth anniversary of something made much of a splash. But nostalgia addicts need more, more. Now we celebrate or mourn on the fifth, the fifteenth, whatever. The more the better. And with some creative thinking, we can free ourselves forever from the tyranny of the multiples-of-five celebration.

Take “Saturday Night Live’s” fifteenth anniversary, for example. Yes, it’s nice to survive the fickle Nielsens that long, but take out all the years in which “SNL” was not one bit funny, and the show is just now reaching its ninth anniversary. It’s party time again. Or try the same tactics with People magazine, which also popped the corks for its fifteenth not long ago. Subtract all issues that pictured a scowling Sly Stallone accompanied by an Amazonian blonde, and you’re ready to whoop it up for the mag’s third anniversary. Salud.

Getting the picture? To increase our nostalgia intake, we’ve got to look for those more offbeat anniversary opportunities. On December 8, we recalled to our sorrow that John Lennon has been gone nine years. The annual tributes were richly deserved. But let’s not forget that 1990 is also the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Beatles’ ill-fated meeting with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which loosed upon the world a plague of Nehru jackets and love beads. And 1990 is also, if memory serves, the twentieth anniversary of the first time we were punished by the alleged music of the mosquito-shrieking Yoko Ono, which Lennon, blinded by love, pronounced superior to his own.

So seek out the odd angle, the more recherche variation on the theme. And now… for those who want to take a quantum leap beyond the common herd of anniversary fetishists, there is something new: keep in mind that January 2000 will mark the tenth anniversary of the first time you heard about the Preversary,R a new concept in nostalgia.

An example from politics will demonstrate the true genius of the Preversary. On January 20, when your neighbor invites you to a party for the tenth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, you raise brows, suppress a snicker, and tell him you are all tied up with celebrating-or lamenting-the sixth Preversary of the January 1996 inauguration of Dan Quayle, otherwise known as the Absolute Rock Bottom of Democracy. Let others remain mired in the old-fashioned nostalgia of the past: you’re already nostalgic for things that haven’t even happened yet.

The Preversary is ideal for the sports fan as well. The cockeyed optimist may want to combine Super Sunday, January 28, with a Preversary celebration of January 29, 1995, when the Cowboys will return to the big game. The pessimist is sure to argue that because the Cowboys last visited the Super Bowl in 1979, this month is not only the eleventh anniversary of the Cowboy-less Super Bowl, but also the ninth Preversary of Super Bowl XXXIII in 1999, when we will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Cowboys’ last trip to the Big One. I think. Since Preversaries haven’t happened yet, they are delightfully free of reality-based constraints. Why not celebrate this month as the third or fourth Preversary of your oldest enemy’s public humiliation as a child moles-ter? It might happen, and if he or she avoids the headlines, you’ll still have had your fun. Or perhaps this month marks the second Preversary of the day your boss finally walks into your office and says, “Shively, I haven’t had a fresh idea in years. Only your pluck and brains have kept us afloat this long. You take over on Monday.” Really, waiting until something happens before celebrating it seems so archaic. Let’s enjoy those Preversaries now and every year; if they actually come to pass, just convert them to anniversaries. An advance pat on the back never hurt anyone.

THOSE IN THE GRIP OF TERMINAL NOSTALgia must realize that there is no cure. For a while we pinned our hopes on Kramden-Norton therapy, wherein nostalgia sufferers were shown endless reruns of “The Honey-mooners” while ruthless TV critics pointed out flubbed lines and flimsy, improbable plots. Alas. Every terminal case remained convinced that the series was the apex of the comic art, and that nothing else on TV has ever been as good.

You’ll just have to live with the problem, remembering that our society frowns on people who feel nostalgic for events that took place less than three hours ago. In the meantime, let me recommend a great science fiction story I read when I was a kid-back when they really knew how to think up weird creatures and bizarre twists. The story was called “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (the author’s name eludes me), and it took place in a future time when most people had mindless, unbearable jobs and spent the rest of the time zonked or watching the box. May have been 1986. So these scientists came up with a great way to liven things up: you picked the thrilling life you wish you had had, and they just zapped the memories of that life right into your synapses. Movie star, Casanova, famed model, whatever. And for no extra charge they’d wipe out any memories of the operation, so your fake memories were for all practical purposes the same as your real memories.

Great stuff, huh? And of course, sci-fi so often becomes reality. I did a big series for the Times on some of the early memory transplants…Oh, you read those? Yeah, I guess they did have a certain flair. Listen, drop by sometime and I’ll show you that Pulitzer 1 got. I’ll never forget the day they told me I’d won. What a memory.