Might they have ridden a "fixie" like the Schwinn in the middle of this photo?
If they had, they might have borne the wrath of all the disdain I heaped upon that decade's young and annoying people: the yuppies.
Now, I've never been a yuppie or a hipster. Couldn't have been either, even if I'd wanted to. But I'll make a confession: Back in those days, I wore a cycling jacket in a pink just like the one on that bike. It was a rather nice jacket, actually.
You know that anyone who ends a sentence with "actually" isn't wearing a jacket in a color like that! Likewise, on the day I learned, in Sociology 101, that my family was "working class," I was no longer part of it. Now, what that's got to do with hipster fixies and yuppies and a jacket I wore twenty years ago, I don't know.
All I know is that if I'm rambling the way I just did after seeing a tacky bike in a shop, I've spent too many hours reading way too many student papers. Some of them were due months ago; I suppose I've been suffused with the "holiday spirit." Plus, I don't want to deny any student whose "sob story" may actually be true. I mean, what if some freshman's grandmother died for the fifth time this year?
If she did, she sure won't be riding that bike in the picture. Me, I wouldn't be caught dead on it. But you probably knew that already.
