One of the reasons I'm as obsessed with pop culture as I am is that I grew up somewhat isolated from it. My didn't have a television for much of my childhood, so I missed things like Saved by the Bell and The Simpsons almost entirely (It made Turn Off the TV Week sooooo much easier. My sister and I smoked that contest like it wasn't no thang [query: is there a past form of "ain't"? plural?]. ) I was only vaguely aware of who Kurt Cobain was when he died, thanks to the ministrations of a savvy older cousin, who convinced me that Axl Rose was a permanent jerk for being mean to Courtney Love, and who sided with me in defending Tonya Harding against the deeply annoying Nancy Kerrigan. I was kind of a strange little girl. My parents have a great collection of early Beatles and Beach Boys records, which I loved so much I broke the record player by jumping up and down next to it, and I listed to cassettes of the same artists until I wore them out. Moving to Massachusetts was a revelation for me, in part because it marked the time when I started watching Ghostwriter regularly, and a few years later, stumbled onto the local KISS station and became obsessively devoted to Top 40 countdowns. "Unbreak My Heart" was a revelation. In addition to being strange, I was a cultural late bloomer.
So this New York Times piece on the eerie surge of premature pop culture nostalgia by people my age succeeds not in kindling any particular warm fuzzies for me, but in making me feel, at 24, old AND out of it. That said, I'm willing to support anything that promotes Harry and the Potters: