Mulligan’s and Memory Lane

The Mulligan’s Reunion is tomorrow night at Di Giulio’s Restaurant, the restaurant on Mulligan’s former site on Hertel Avenue in Buffalo.

The reunion is being advertised as a trip down memory lane back to the ‘70’s, when Danny Gare and OJ Simpson used to stop by to breathe in the disco atmosphere. It is expected to recreate those good times thirty years ago. That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it.

I think the ‘70’s should rest in peace. We should kindly reminisce about the ’70’s about as often as we kindly reminisce about polio.

It is forever tainted by the fiasco of Vietnam and the post-Vietnam recovery for millions of disenfranchised young adults, and flower children searching for direction and a way to grow up. It was the time of Watergate. Polyester was the clothing material of choice, earth tones and bean bag chairs were everywhere. And worst of all, disco was one of the most unoriginal, dead-ended forms of rock and roll music (obviously; it was a flash in the pan) yet that was all that commercial radio played for years. Historians have not been kind to the ‘70’s and future historians will be even less kind. Many of those with whom I hung around breathed a collective sigh of relief when 1980 arrived.

The decade had virtually no redeeming social value. I am embarrassed for it.