Cool Again Forever on Facebook

Oh-hey-look I’m writing about Facebook again. Instead of getting rich off a similar pyramid scheme, or “marketing myself” off-Facebook, where it count$, I’m sitting around in the dingy Facebook Fascination bathwater we all seem to be wrinkling up in.

Neverandnonetheless, I started a group late last month on The ’Book (as I call it), called “Frandor Forever.” No big deal, I’ve started one before. I just invited a few friends from college to join me in an online celebration of photos of ourselves from back in the day. It was as easy as pushing a button, 1-2-3. Not many bells and whistles on the Facebook groups, kids.

But when I pushed the button, something exploded. And I think I’ve figured out why.

First, an explanation of what it is. The official blurb on the group page is: A Facebook group to share our memories of Michigan State University and Greater East Lansing circa 1985-1995, give or take.

Originally, I had sent the following Facemail (as I call it) message to about 15 college friends on Facebook:

I want you all to know that a little bodega on Columbia Road a few hundred yards from where I live in Adams Morgan/D.C. underwent some construction this summer and then last week unveiled what they had been working on: They turned a corner of their store into an OH YEAH YOGURT. Remember that place in East Lansing? Across from Pinball Pete’s… I believe it was then replaced by Caffe Venezia… Long live OH YEAH YOGURT! Who knew it was a chain that can survive decades and creep up on you and scare you like that?

Well, everybody started talking about the old days in this Facemail message thread. It was getting out of hand, with lots of new responses all the time, so I said, You wanna know what? I feel a Facebook group coming on. What should I call it?

Frandor is this trashy, weird shopping center named for the husband and wife that developed it in the mid-20th century — Francis and Dorothy Something — in East Lansing. So the name Frandor itself in an insider tip to people who attended MSU but also left campus once in a while. By not making an explicit reference to Michigan State, I was being a little more roundabout with the naming than, say, “Spartan Pride” or “MSU Memories.” It was code, a dog-whistle to my friends, though it’s served to keep (I hope) the former fratboys and fratgirls out. Then as now, I’m a snob. It’s the difference between:

Now, what else would encourage the sharing of memories? Maybe the word “forever.” Frandor Forever. Nicely alliterative, also reminiscent of John Waters’s script for the never-filmed sequel to Pink Flamingos, dubbed Flamingos Forever. John Waters was our patron saint back then. Before his movies lost their teeth and Hairspray slipped down to middlebrow schlock.

Forever also implies our own immortality, which we all believed in when we were 19. And here’s me coming to my point. I think the reason hundreds and hundreds of people have now joined Frandor Forever is that we’re all pushing 40 (from one side of the number or the other) but we’re on Facebook, which was designed… for whom? For college kids. And what are we reminiscing about? College. Where are we doing it? Right in the very midst of oblivious present-day college kids. An unspoken invitation lurks for these young whippersnappers to come look at what the truly cool once looked like.

Anyway, the more we discuss what bands we were in, or went to see (I saw the Pixies live in 1989, okay?), or liked, and look at pictures of ourselves smoking and drinking and living in filth (John Waters’s ideal) and dressing up and being badass and young and thin and beautiful, the more flattered we become with our best memories of ourselves.

In the hundreds of photos that FF members have posted, it’s become manifestly clear that we were the kool kids at Moo U. Even with the pics of people I don’t know, who were there at the same time as me, otherwise not so interesting, the amazing fashions alone are worth the price of admission.

I’m sure some totally not-kool kids have waltzed in to the group under my non-watchful eye. Welcome, all! Like multi-colored food items, aging unkool and aging kool kids all come out the same color in the end. We all get equalized by Father Time, the Equalizer.

There have been lots of news articles about how the average age of Facebook members is slowly creeping upward. But no one has said why.

Here’s your answer. For the 40ish set, Frandor Forever (or your own time- and place-specific online reunion where people belatedly “meet” people and put names to faces they recognize from parties 20 years ago but never met at the time, where people demand that college-town luminaries join Facebook in order to participate in the group, where a detail in a photo makes dusty corners of your brain open up to let little clusters of memories fly out) is what Facebook was meant for.

Read more SM SHRAKE at You Wanna Know What? and The Shrake-tionary.

TAGS: Defriending • East Lansing • facebook • Frandor • John Waters • Kool Kids • Michigan State University • Pixies • Reunions • Washington D.C.