School House Rock Live!

I can't think of anything more quintessential to the formative years of Gen X than the School House Rock series we used to enjoy in between cartoons on Saturday mornings....

I recently went with a friend I grew up with, my husband, and my daughter to the Montgomery Theater in San Jose, CA where we watched School House Rock Live. They did a great job of making many of the most well-loved School House Rock characters come alive on stage.

A little bit of math, some politics, some grammar, some good music to go with it, and we were all enjoying ourselves no matter what our age. The stage was full of all kinds of talented kids from elementary school to high school.  We gave them a standing ovation at the end for doing such a great job.

It was fun to see all the Gen Xers there with their kids, nieces, and nephews. Just another fun way of passing down the good stuff from our generation to the next one.

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(c) 2015 photos and writing by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved

The Breakfast Club

February 15, 1985 - 30 years ago - The Breakfast Club came out in theaters. I was in elementary school at the time and didn't see this Brat Pack film until high school. I graduated ten years later, but the issues of the movie still existed then, just as they still do now. What the film teaches us is that we have more in common with each other than we often initially realize, and that we all struggle with isolation, and pressure, and trying to be true to ourselves. Being human means having angst, being a teenager gives you an extra dose of it. John Hughes wrote/produced/directed what is considered one of the best high school movies of all time, and it has a certain timelessness to it. Even their clothes are somehow timeless.

The flashback edition which I hope to see someday has background commentary by the actors.

Photo from Amazon - link below:

Breakfast Club Flashback Edition

This is considered by many to be the quintessential movie of Generation X. One of the many things I love about my generation is that we are known for breaking the mold in which we found ourselves, for being the first generation to be open to others even if they came from a very different background, for being people who could hang out in multiple social circles that were all very different from each other.

From the end of the movie, in an essay/letter written to their principal is the movie's most well-loved quote: 

"You see us as you want to see us. In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal..."  -The Breakfast Club

from wanelo.com 

Now that 30 years have gone by, and we are now the age of the adults in the movie, this is a reminder to us of how to treat our own kids, of how to treat the younger generation in general so that they don't see us the way the kids in the movie saw the older generation. As we grow older and become the "powers that be" it's good to remember the angst that those older than us once gave us, and to not make the same mistakes.  

"And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultation.  They're quite aware of what they're going through."   

-David Bowie 

"To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."  

-Voltaire

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(c) 2015 - by Chloe Koffas

Why We Need New Beginnings

Northern California at Sunrise -

Photography from the back seat of a car heading through the hills of the Pacheco Pass toward Central California....

A new year begins and I wonder if I filled the last one with everything I should have. Last year is now gone, and if I keep wondering or worrying, I'm not living in the present.  And all we truly have is the present.  










The sun shows its glow, but does not yet show itself -  and it's strange the way a captured moment can look like it is both sunrise and sunset at the same time.

The first time I saw the sun rise over the hills of Northern California was about ten years ago after visiting an Orthodox Christian monastery with friends. I never forgot that morning or how purified my soul felt as we left there. The last time I saw the Northern California sunrise was not so long ago - the sun was both pink and yellow shunting its warming rays on the chilly, tired earth, the hills soft blue in the distance.

So many times I have prayed, asking God, "Where are you?"  or

"Why aren't you listening?"  or

"Why won't you help me?"

And I have finally begun to look back on my life and see how many of those seemingly unheard prayers were being answered incrementally, slowly, then exponentially.

It often happened the way the sun rises so seemingly slowly when you are waiting for it, the way the darkness of night seems so reluctant to leave. Yet we are traveling around the sun at over 66,000 miles an hour.

Morning goes by and noon comes - the sun is full in the sky above us, covering us and our surroundings with 360 degrees of light. 

Sometimes when I see the sun rise, this unexpected peace comes over me that everything is going to be okay - even when a hundred unfitted puzzle pieces lay around waiting for their place in the short term, I know in these moments that the bigger picture will be beautiful when those pieces come together.

Still, we wait for those pieces to come together. And this is why we need new beginnings - because of all that goes wrong in this broken down world. We need new beginnings so we can once again have hope that all those scattered puzzle pieces of our lives will eventually fit together. We need new beginnings because we mess up, because we misunderstand, because we are misunderstood.


Many mornings in my life I did not see the sun rise in this life because I was focused on the scratches on the window.

But the sun continued to rise,

again and again.

Here's to new beginnings, here's to all our dreams coming true - even if not as soon as we would like them to - even if just moment by moment, even if it all happens slowly and incrementally, may it all happen exponentially. 

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(c) 2015 writing and photography by Chloe Koffas, all rights reserved

Christmas Classics of Generation X

There is a whole set of Christmas Classics that Generation X remembers watching in their growing up years....

We got this keepsake set a few years back that includes the holiday specials along with the music that goes with them.  It's the time of year to take this out again.

Images I remember from my Generation X childhood....

This is the 50th anniversary of Rudolph and the US Postal Service is issuing stamps with the characters from the holiday special.  

This set includes Rudolph, the Frosty the Snowman set, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, The Little Drummer Boy, and one I'd never seen before getting this box set: Cricket on the Hearth.


Happiest of holidays, Gen X ~

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and a Couple of Things I'm Thankful For

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving initially aired in 1973, so Generation X remembers watching this each November during our growing up years...

One of the biggest things I am thankful for right now is all the people who have visited my blog this year for the first time, and I'm just as thankful for those who have come back for the hundredth time.

These DVDs get pulled out every year when in the fall and winter for my family and I to enjoy, sometimes with friends, and sometimes with good food. There's something about this time of the year when it comes to the pop culture of the formative years of Generation X - the movies and specials, the characters we grew to love, and everything else.

Thank you fellow Xers, for sharing this time of the year with me ~

The Fall of the Berlin Wall - 25 Years Ago Today

25 years ago today was when The Berlin Wall fell. The falling of the wall was one of the biggest international events, if not the biggest event, to happen during the formative years of Generation X. 

I had always wanted a piece of the wall of my own.

Having grown up Generation X, we saw pretty much everything crumble around us, from what we watched on the news, to our families and society in general. It was an era where a lot went wrong. That is why I clung to God throughout my childhood - everything fell apart around me and it was clear that nothing was going to be consistent. I took that faith into my adulthood as I've struggled with the larger questions like:

1) Is God really there?
2) If so, does he listen to our prayers?
3) If so, does he listen to me?

From the third question came this thing that I do every so often: I pray a prayer that would be mathematically impossible (or the odds would be astronomical) for these things to randomly come true - only possible for it to be answered by a Higher Power capable of anything. In other words, I ask for something incredibly detailed, profoundly specific, and extremely random so that I know that that if the prayer gets answered it is not just a coincidence but really God.

Since my connection to my generation is very important to me, and since the fall of the Wall was so important to the experience of my generation, this was my prayer that I prayed a few years ago:

"I would like you to give me my own piece of the Berlin Wall. I'd like it to be given to me by someone who was there right when (or soon after) the wall fell who chiseled it out themselves so I know it is the real thing. I would like that person to be a Gen Xer. I would like them to bring a large piece with them to my house, and then break off a smaller piece for me to keep so that I can see the larger piece it comes from and so I know it is 100% authentic. I'd like this all to happen right before the 25th anniversary of the falling of the wall."

Right as I was about to move away from Portland Oregon last spring, some friends came over to visit. One of my friends told me she had a gift for me - it was a poster she had bought on the street in Berlin shortly after the wall fell. She had kept it all those years in storage in her Portland house. She also had brought a piece of the wall to show me, and all the sudden she unexpectedly felt the inspiration to break off a piece of her piece to give to me. She borrowed a hammer, took her piece to the floor of my garage and broke off a piece for me.

I was in shock - the prayer had been answered down to every detail.  I grabbed my camera and took photos of the poster, the hammer, my piece of the wall...

What I learned from this experience:

1) We are all connected to something much larger to ourselves in a way much more substantial and tangible than we can imagine.
2) While we struggle with how much our prayers are heard and why some do not seem to get answered, prayers do get answered.
3) We are loved far, far beyond what we could possibly imagine.

The dust from the Berlin Wall sits in the seams in the cement of the garage in my old house in Portland Oregon, because there was a moment in space and time when the whole universe bent down and bowed before me so something extraordinary could happen.

The most consistent thing to happen in our lives - the lives of Generation X - was a constant crumbling of everything around us, and the biggest international event to happen in our formative years was the crumbling of a giant monolithic wall. As we head from one year in time to another, may all the walls of our lives fall - every wall that keeps us from something good - every wall that keeps us isolated, every wall that keeps us believing that our prayers go unheard...  

...our prayers are heard. 

For H.P. 

 (c) Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved. If anyone knows the photographer who took the picture for this poster, email me and I will credit them ~

Harmony for Humanity

This week my family and I attended Harmony for Humanity at Stanford's Memorial Church - a musical tribute that is part of an international network of concerts to honor the memory of Daniel Pearl - a Generation X journalist with both Israeli and American citizenship who was slain in 2002. Daniel attended Stanford as a young man and each year a musical tribute is held here by students and faculty. The tribute also takes place each year on the same day in other places around the world.

It was the strangest thing on our way there, it felt like it was the first day Autumn had finally come to to that part of Bay Area. It was as if the wind and leaves and sky were paying a tribute to Daniel's memory that evening.  Daniel was a perfect example of one of the best assets of the collective personality of Generation X - respect and understanding for other cultures.

Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann gave a beautiful and comforting sermon about the night. She mentioned how the annual musical tribute for him always happens in the Fall since that was the time of year Danny was born, and she talked about the Festival of Sukkot in which we found ourselves - a time of year to focus on what matters most - community, charity, being open to the world around us. Sukkots were the temporary and fragile shelters, the tents, that the Hebrews lived in during their sojourn in the desert. She spoke of how there is a certain vulnerability in these structures - that if we exist in structures like these, both literally and figuratively, others can easily enter them. If we live figuratively in vulnerable structures like this we are more open to the world. It is our vulnerability that connects us to everything and everyone around us.

Daniel's sister Michelle exudes a sweetness that can be felt across the room. She spoke a few words as well and said that she finds herself amazed at the beauty she sees that comes from humanity, which made me start to cry.

Dusk had turned the sky into the richest blue, and while waiting for the doors to open, we lined up quietly among the people paying tribute. I wore all black to mourn the loss, I dressed my daughter in brighter colors to celebrate rebirth into a better place.

We listened reverently to the sounds of the string quartet as the music of Bach carried up toward the glass ceiling. We looked up at at icons of history, especially those honoring Jewish tradition. The mosaic images of the four archangels leaned down over us, watching over human history as generations come and depart, as we try to leave the world a better place than how we found it.  

The Daniel Pearl Foundation promotes mutual respect and understanding 

among diverse cultures through journalism, music and dialogue.  

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(c) 2014 writing and photography by Chloe Koffas