Maglev to Shambala with Kevin Paquet

A commercial I’ve seen running recently begins with the woeful tale of a woman forced to bear the brunt of poor decisions made by an earlier, less enlightened generation. Surrounded by her spacious house, she congratulates herself for owning such a nice piece of property, but bemoans the atrocious bathroom, which she says has a pink tub and avocado green tiles. I’m taking her word for it. I have a black and white TV set that was built around the same time as her bathroom.

“It was so seventies!” she grieves. I think this is rather hypocritical coming from someone sitting on a plaid couch, but that’s just me. Of course, this woman is not a college student. If she was, she’d just be grateful that she has her own, clean bathroom. Listening to her gripe about the color scheme is like having someone drive up to me in a Rolls-Royce and say, “Would you believe it? This thing only plays cassettes!”

In 2004, I bought a book from Randolph’s Kimball Public Library, which has a book sale every summer. The book was called “Modern American and British Poetry,” and it was compiled by a man named Louis Untermeyer and published in 1928. Mr. Untermeyer, who is doubtless dust in the ground by now, very sagely noted that “’Modern’ is, perhaps, the most misleading adjective in the dictionary. There is no term more fluctuant and elusive, that shifts its meanings with greater rapidity, that turns its back on those ardent champions who defended it most stubbornly.” Or, as late night talk-show host Craig Ferguson sings in the opening theme for his program, “tomorrow’s just a future yesterday.”

Style is furtive, deceptive, savage. My father, who was a construction superintendent, would often find traces of bygone eras in the buildings he renovated. For me, the most vivid example was a room in the Randolph Union High School. This room had been the Home Ec department, but was on its way to being a computer lab – reflecting, perhaps, American society’s slow, drunken stagger away from the skills required for home living, and towards the soon-to-be-crucial skill of playing Solitaire in your cubicle without being found out.

The room had long ago been repainted white, but remnants of its old “earth-tone” color scheme could be found in the avocado-colored kitchen unit and, when this was dismantled, the section of fungoid-yellow carpet directly underneath. Indeed, many of the buildings here on campus were painted in similar colors (look for wear marks that strip away the most recent layer of paint on things like stall doors) and there is, of course, the avocado-colored fridge in one of the Bentley labs. Institutions, unlike people, don’t throw things away just because they’re tacky. As a matter of fact, that fridge is probably the highlight of that lab, inasmuch as most of the decoration comes from disturbing-looking field biology tools mounted on the opposite wall.

My father used to believe that these fluctuating color schemes were somehow coordinated across industries, so that the same style appears on everything (electronics, cars, clothing, etc.) He wasn’t exactly sure how, though; my own theory involved some sort of High Council that met somewhere once every few years. I ran this by Eric Kirk, the design guy in the Print Shop where I work, and he affirmed that there was a source for style – the fashion runway. Which would explain why nothing – not cars with horizontal fins, not faux-wood TV sets, not 1960s album covers – dates so fast and so spectacularly as clothing.

I myself own an impressive collection of phantasmagoric ties, which I mix and match with the horrid polyester suits I’ve picked up over the years. And yet, no matter how hard I try, I never come out looking as bad as the people I see on old TV shows. My favorite is “The Lawrence Welk Show,” which ran for three stylish decades and embraced the change to color with a zeal generally associated with narcotics.

“The Lawrence Welk Show” was a bandstand program hosted by polka magnate MC Welk, who exuded a kind of wholesome cheer not generally associated with modern America. Wildly out of touch with the real world, nothing could have matched Welk’s moods better than the clothing worn by his musicians, who always came out looking like novelty vegetable strains, and his dancers, who looked like radioactive birds of paradise. The absolute best I ever saw was one man, dressed entirely in black, with a black bowler, and with what I would swear were Froot Loops glued around the hat and up the suit for accent.

The show currently airs on PBS, and the old programs are intercut with newer clips featuring the still-living members of the “Welk Family.” I remember, vividly, the show hosted by Welk’s costume designer, a little old lady who had dyed her hair an ungodly shade of bromine red. Cutting back from a dance sequence in which a man had been wearing a plaid suit bad beyond words, she cheerfully affirmed, without any trace of irony, that she had gotten the suit at a thrift store.

There may come a time when bold plaid suits surge to the height of fashion – which is claimed to be cyclical – but it’s not a day I look forward to. After all, what’s the fun of polyester leisurewear when everybody’s doing it?

As for the woman with the pink tub: The commercial was for a company called Bath Fitter, whose website says they do “one-day bath remodeling,” which I’m sure was perfect for a fashion-conscious individual like herself. A one-day replacement means that she can replace her bathroom once, twice, maybe even three times a month in order to keep pace with the mirage she’s chasing. I just hope she takes a long, hard look at herself the day she ends up with a pink tub again.