That Great 70s Slide Night!

Some people remember this long-lost social tradition. For most, the Great Slide Night is a faded memory until someone triggers it again, like now.

“Slide nights? Oh yeah. Hey! I remember those! What happened to them?”

Before I answer that question, let’s recall what a typical suburban slide night looked like.

Fondues and flared corduroys appeared on most slide nights. Copper art and things made in mission brown or walnut were also present. The Carpenters or perhaps The Eagles were playing on vinyl.

(Are those memories intensifying?)

The seventies were the decade of The Great Slide Night, a strange yearly routine where neighbours gathered to see projected still images of someone’s past travel adventures on a large white screen.

I know. I took part in it three times.

As a kid, one of my jobs was to roll out a reverse blind-like object on a stand (the screen).

People from around the neighbourhood arrived at night to see a screen set up in our living room. The machine had to sit on top of a coffee table and a few select books to get the height right for the projector’s lens.

My mother offered food and drinks (and ashtrays, too). Ashtrays were necessary, as everyone smoked in the 1970s.

I remember loading the slide cartridge for my dad before the visitors arrived. His precious slides had to go into it in a particular order and a certain way. I was in charge. I took my responsibility seriously. Each slide inserted into the cartridge needed to go upside down. At eight, I knew that right-side up was the wrong way around. I also learned about left and right. It was easy to get a slide backwards either way.

“Next slide, boy,” my dad said with a nod. I pressed the red button on the machine, and it clicked. Our living room went dark momentarily. There was a clackety-clack, and then the screen lit up with a new image.

A great show was when no one had to tip their head over to see a picture. A perfect night was when Dad nodded and said, “Thanks, boy.”

I’m the eldest child in my family and was allowed to stay up long after my siblings went to bed. There was a limit to that freedom though. My job was over when the show was done. After-dinner-mints would come out and I’d be ushered down the hallway before the box was opened.

Looking back, the whole slide show thing seems somewhat bizarre.

Why did neighbours want to see my dad’s travel slides anyway? We didn’t know these people, not really.

Dad’s pictures were boring, mostly of Singapore (he was in the NAVY).xI remember there were lots of cars, motorcycles and people riding/driving them.

If someone in my street knocked on my door today and said they had a showing of photos inside their home next Saturday night, we’d probably call the police and watch social media for the updates.

When I think about what people take photos of today, Dad’s pics hardly made for interesting content at all.

There were never any shots of the plates of food he ate.

No coffee cup pics appeared anywhere.

No fancy cocktails being drunk at popular beaches in front of golden sunsets.

No girls in yoga pants standing on their heads outside Hindu temples.

There were definitely no selfies.

And the neighbours still came to see them anyway.

What happened to The Great 70s Slide Night? Why didn’t it become The Great Slide Night of The 80s or The 90s?

Mini-labs.

The one-hour colour processing and printing system changed how we took and displayed our images.

People stopped projecting their images onto screens and started putting their printed photos into frames and albums. Viewings required virtually no effort. There’s no projection screen to set up and no projector to load and focus. A viewing doesn’t even need to be held at night. One-on-one showings can happen anywhere and at any time.

Eventually, the slide night disappeared.

Now, we use our devices to take and display images — or send them to social media, or photography platforms.

I try to translate what my parents did back then into a modern context, but I find it hard to come up with an equivalent. The internet doesn’t have an event like a slide show. There are lots of options to share images with others, but nothing like the humble slide night.

Social media certainly has greater reach but our parents weren’t looking for reach or likes. This was done for our neighbours. Neighbourly niceness was a frequent part of seventies life. Locals took care of one other.

When I retired as a photographer, I wrote a book about photography. It’s not a how-to book. It’s a novel about a photographer trying to make it in the wedding photography business. We meet some characters drawn to taking pictures of couples in an intimate period of their lives.

There’s Linda, the homebound housewife who takes wedding pictures on the weekend to escape her unfulfilling marriage.

Maxine takes wedding photos because she adores parties and complimentary champagne. She doesn’t mind men in suits, either. She’s known to wake up with a groomsman and then brag about it the next day.

Andrew knows the wedding photography business better than anyone and keeps his private life private. It works most of the time, but Maxine’s mouth is unpredictable. When the champagne flows, so does the information. Maxine and Andrew have been seeing each other on the side, and everyone knows. Andrew denies anything.

Someone is going to die.

Over this?

Like many artists, photography attracts people driven by personal expression. This passion is often accompanied by two parts: insecurity and acceptance. When these needs aren’t met, the result can force an emotional storm powerful enough for them to commit an inexplicable outburst of deadly violence.

There. That was easy to say. Make sense now?

The novel is called SEETHINGS, and is available here — free for a limited time.

By the way, Maxine didn’t die.

Or did she?

–Michael Forman

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