Millennials Can't Write Cursive But We Had Vietnam Flashbacks at Age 9 _ Tammy Pescatelli

Thank you. Hey, I don't even know what to say anymore. That was a lot. I don't think this many people liked me when I went to school here. Now listen, I see a lot of young millennials in here and I love you and I'm going to talk to you because I love what you're going to do. You guys are going to change things because you have hope. We don't have hope, but we can write in cursive. Might need us to read the Declaration of Independence one day, so you better be nice. Part of me coming back here is when no one believed, no one believed in us. We weren't allowed to have hopes and dreams. We were, children were supposed to be, now listen to this, what, seen and not heard. You see how all the old people said that? Because we've been dying to say something in public since the 80s. Seen and not heard. That meant as long as you were present, you were a good kid. Like a mute child was the perfect child for our parents back then. We weren't allowed to have, we weren't friends with our parents. Millennials, you're friends with your parents. Look, I see some of you here tonight with your parents. I don't even know my mother's first name. I asked her once. She was like, none of your damn business. That's what it is. Millennials, God bless you, you're just not tough. I love you. But I could take your whole generation out with a jar of peanuts, all right? Just not tough. We weren't allowed to have feelings. I remember once telling my father, I'm like, I'm cold. He was like, no, you're not. Okay, I guess I'm not. I don't know. We would do things like, you would have nicknames based on your flaws. I have a brother, To-do-to-do. Yeah, because he used to play with a toilet paper roll all the time. You know, to-do, to-do, to-do, to-do, to-do, to-do, to-do, to-do. We only let him play with that because he broke all our toys. Broke my Easy-Bake Oven. You know what that is? Millennials, that's a little mini meth lab is what that is. Like, it would explode, you'd get third degree burns. He broke our Stretch Armstrong. That was indestructible. They showed the commercial, two trucks pulling it apart. That little to-do, to-do broke it. And you know what came out of it? Ooze. Chernobyl slime. It was crazy. We had horrible toys back then. My son solved the Rubik's Cube. We had the Rubik's Cube, but I never solved it. Not for real. I did peel the stickers off and tell everybody. Sorry that I have to admit that now, sorry. That generation grew up, you grew up with things to do. When you're in the car going somewhere, you're on your cell phones, your iPhones, you're playing on the iPad, you're watching DVDs. We had nothing in the backseat of the car, nothing. We used to make up games specifically to hit each other, right? If a Volkswagen Beetle passed your car and its headlight was out, someone was getting knocked out. That, I mean, those were the rules. To-do, to-do lost two teeth one summer. And my father yelled at him, you should have paid attention. You should have paid attention. Everything we did was about hitting each other. Remember a game called Two for Flinching? See, if you were an only child, you missed out on this. This is where your brother or sister or whatever your siblings were, they all of a sudden developed ninja-like skills. They could hide on door jams, right? They would, behind couches, they would jump out of nowhere. You'd just be walking along and all of a sudden they would jump out and throw a punch and stop like just a little, just like millimeters from your face. And if you flinched, they'd punch you two more times. Two for flinching. You're like nine years old walking around like you have Vietnam flashbacks. See, you young kids think you invented the twerk, but we've been twerking for a long time. We just call it twitch. Now I have a 21-year-old nephew who comes and stays with me and he came in and he was all sweaty and he had a gym bag and he put it on the counter and I go, what's going on? He said, I joined a fight club. Well, you're going to get kicked out. You just broke the first rule. So, not all jokes are for everybody, okay? I don't believe in that everybody's a winner stuff. You got to work to be a winner, all right? So when, you know, a kid joins the fight club and I couldn't, I just couldn't wrap my brain around it. You know, I thought about it for a long time and I said to him, I go, I don't understand, why would you join a, what did they have a Dungeons and Dragons tournament? Why would you join a fight club? And he said to me, listen, prepare yourself. He said, I wanted to learn how to take a punch. I said, lean over the counter. I will knock you out for half the membership fee. We had to be tough. People didn't care about us. They would forget us. If we went on vacation, sometimes you'd hear those stories of a kid being left at a rest area for like six hours. Do the math, old math, not this new stupid math, do the math, the real basic math. Six hours. That means the parents had to drive for three hours before they realized that little brat was not in the car because you didn't have to have a seatbelt. I told you, because nobody cared about us. You could lay in the back window. You could lay on the hump. No one cared. You could run alongside. They thought it was funny. They did not care. You go to try, try to put a seatbelt on and your father go, what do you think? I'm a bad driver. It's just different. We, we could do anything we want. Go anywhere. Be like, I'm going, I'm going outside. There were two places, outside and inside. Like literally, your parents knew that your friend's house was eight miles down the street across traffic. You had to ride your, your bicycle, that the handlebars were way up here. That's why we all have back problems because we had to, you'd go across four Dobermans would chase you. Dobermans, millennials. That was the meanest dog we had. We didn't have pit bulls. We invented that for you because we can't hit you. So figured we can scare you into submission. Nobody hits you. We, we got hit by everybody, everybody. You could get hit at school. You could get paddled at school. You didn't get detentions. A principal could paddle you, right? Mr. Casella. Right? Different. You'd go down to your friend's house. What was the big thing? What was it? They didn't, they didn't have a cell phone on you, right? Or a little longitude latitude. What was their big protection scheme for us when we were kids? Take your little brother. Oh, so what? The kidnapper wouldn't have to come back twice. Is that why? Why make him put miles on his van? It was a good time and, and different things like, you know, it was pure as a kid. We didn't have to, when you learned, you learned in school and then you went home and you didn't have to learn anything else, right? We didn't have to. No one read to us to teach us stuff. You don't, don't look at, I see some of the parents around here. I know my mother knows she's here. Nobody read to us. You guys handed us a book with a record in it. In the room, the fairy will tell you when to turn the page. Just didn't want to deal. Cartoons didn't teach us anything. My son watches, uh, he knows, he knows how to speak Spanish from that door they explore, right? Granted, all I can say is where's the map, but whatever, uh, we might need to know where the map is one day. I don't know. What if we didn't learn anything? We had three hours of cartoons on a Saturday morning that you better not wake your parents up for because they had gotten drunk the night before because they did back then. Okay. Listen, now, even some of you might get drunk tonight, you'll have to pretend you have the flu tomorrow. We knew they got drunk. We would tell people they were getting drunk. It'd be like, it'd be Friday. We'd be at lunch going, you should ask your mom if you can come over because dad is going to get paid. They're going to get drunk and argue for who shot Jr. Saturday morning for crazy, crazy. That's, those were the mornings too, uh, that other brothers and sisters were made. I mean, I don't know for sure. My one brother does cause he walked in. Now, I don't know what he saw, but I can tell you what I heard.