A friend of ours, a young woman from Antigua, was here in the States for a short visit, and since we hadn’t been to Antigua in more than ten years we asked her what things were like there.
“It’s just like up here,” she said. “We have everything down there that you have up here. Same fashions, same music. Except for Colonel Sanders. We don’t have a Colonel Sanders. But I know that if we did, it would go over very well.”
We asked her if there was an EST or an Arica Institute or any other kind of consciousness-raising group there.
“What are those?” she asked.
We explained as clearly as we could what those are.
“Oh,” she said in an overly polite tone of voice—a tone of voice (we remembered it from past conversations with this young woman) that she uses to people when she thinks they are being really silly, or going too far.
We asked if The Fonz was popular there.
“The Fonz,” she said. “What’s that?”
We told her that The Fonz was a popular character named Fonzie, in a popular American television show. We told her how he styled his hair and the kinds of fifties clothes he wears, and we showed her his thumbs-up gesture.
She brightened up at this and said, “Well, we haven’t heard of him yet, but even if it takes years we’ll know about him. We pick up all the really good, stylish American things.”
—October 25, 1976