Susan Orlean - Saturday Night

I wonder what it would be like to write this book now, more than two decades after I first began looking at Saturday night around the United States. Its a book that examines a particular slice of social time, and time has transformed into a very different entity in those two decades. In some ways, its become as malleable as taffy, easy to mold into whatever shape we want. Things used to happen when they happened, and only when they happened; time had a stern, insistent way of finding us and stopping us in our tracks. Now it seems like things happen when weve decided were ready for them to happen. The week used to feel like it had such an inviolable order, and within the week, days felt bound and organized and set. Days had distinct personalities. When I was in college, for instance, and banks didnt yet have ATMs, the end of banking hours on Friday was a line of demarcation, the last moment you could get cash for the weekend. The scramble to get to the bank before it closed was part of what made Fridays feel like, well, Fridays. But I havent been in a bank to cash a check for years. These days I meander over to an ATM whenever the need for cash arises. Any day can be cash day. Part of what gave Friday its individuality has been erased. The same is true for every part of the week, including Saturday night.

When I started writing Saturday Night , I was convinced that those markers in time mattered; that having time feel like it had some texture, an ebb and flow, was a comfort and a necessity. The distinctiveness of Saturday night mattered most of all because it was the most electric, emotional portion of the week. Saturday night was also an ideal common denominator. It was the one moment in the week that everyoneregardless of station in life, age, hometown, or ethnicitycould agree upon as being special. For a writer like me, very interested in seeing what makes us similar and what makes us different, and eager to describe a big sweep of American popular culture, Saturday night was a perfect frame through which to view all those sorts of communities. Rich, poor, Westerner, Easterner, teenager, olddespite everything that such people didnt have in common, they did share the feeling that one night of the week had a different tinge. Even staying at home doing nothing on a Saturday nightone of the most usual ways to spend the evening, although not nearly as engaging a subject for journalism as, say, polka dancinghad a noticeable quality. Saturday night was just different. It was the happiest night and the saddest night, the most communal night and the loneliest night, the most public night and the most private night of the week.

The biggest change in Saturday night since this book was first published has been brought about by technology. For instance, in 1990, television was available on a preordained schedule. Video-cassette recorders were just becoming popular. And VCRs were just the beginning. Within a few years they were everywhere, and then they came and went, replaced by even more versatile DVRs; and then DVRs were joined by on-demand programming, and by Hulu, and by TiVo, and by HBO GO, and countless other ways to watch television without regard to a schedule. In other words, its never been easier to watch a specific show whenever you decide to watch it. The control of time, in the case of television, has been placed in the hands of the viewer. As Ron Simon, curator of the Paley Center for Media, put it, what all of these systems offer in convenience has to be balanced against what they took awaythe identification of a specific show with a specific night of the week. For the first three decades of commercial television, Saturday night was a premier spot on the schedule, home to everything from the brilliant sketches of Your Show of Shows to the contemporary controversy of All in the Family . I used to rush home on Saturday nights to watch Saturday Night Live ; now I rarely watch a show when its actually broadcast, and much of the time I couldnt even tell you what the regularly scheduled slot for the show is. Time-shifting television shows are so commonplace now that network programmers have largely given up worrying over the elaborate scheduling of shows; they know that most of the audience will just watch programming whenever they choose to. Its wonderful to be able to watch what I want when I want, but still, theres something lost. I used to love that achy anticipation of waiting for my favorite shows to be on, and I loved the feeling that so many people were watching together. All over the countryat least as I used to picture iteveryone was sitting down at the same time to see the same show. It created a virtual community before we had even thought of the idea of virtual communities.

Community itself has been redefined in the last twenty years. Saturday night used to be an irresistible reporting opportunity because most people used it as the night they gathered with kindred spirits, making it a perfect time for me to observe them in a self-selected group. Weekdays were filled with family and with work associates, but Saturday night was saved for romance or for friendsyour fellow zydeco fans, your club-hopping pals, the other people in town who liked cruising Main Street as much as you did. The opportunity to be with a community of like-minded people was rare and precious. Now that kind of gathering is not so rare and not so easy for a writer to observe. If you are a 55 Chevy aficionado, you dont have to wait for Saturday night to gather with other Chevy aficionados, nor do they even have to live in your town: you can belong to a 55 Chevy Google group and a 55 Chevy Facebook page; you can follow #Chevycruising on Twitter. Online, you can talk about cruising in a Chevy with people all over the world, at any time of day. On one hand, this has made certain kinds of communities bigger, more universal, and more diverse, which is exciting, but I sometimes wonder if its also flattened the communities out to fit on a computer screen. What will it mean if communities with shared interests were all connected on the Internet but no one ever went outside to see what they might see? What would happen to cities, and to Main Streets, nightclubs, bowling alleys, and cafs? Is it a good thing if our real-life ways of gathering, of actually being together in real time, in each others presence, end up withering away?

Often readers will ask me what has become of people Ive written about. Most of the time I dont really know. As a writer, Im a serial monogamist. I fall entirely in love with my subjects while Im engaged with them, and then, thanks to a combination of necessity and circumstance, I move on. I am always interested in what has become of the people and places Ive written aboutin some cases more than others, of coursebut the opportunity to find out often just doesnt present itself. (Again, Ill reference technology here. When I wrote this book, the ways people kept in touch were limited to letters and phone calls, both of which entail a deliberate effort. Now, with email and Facebook, its possible to stay in touch without so much of a commitment; maybe this will usher in a new era of ongoing awareness of my subjects. Well see.)

Its unusual that I revisit a project as Ive done here with Saturday Night , so this was a special chance to satisfy my curiosity, to see what twenty years had wrought. Some of what I learned didnt surprise me. For instance, every one of the hot-for-a-moment Los Angeles clubs that the kids in Scene Making patronized has closed, their moment of Saturday-night significance passed. Stuart Andersons Cattle Company in Portland, where bands went to die, is also closed, and the band No Means Yes never did make it to the big time, although the phenomenon of the aspiring band playing Saturday nights in midrange, midpriced cocktail lounges will surely live on forever. In Elkhart, people still cruise, but gas pricesaround $1.15 when I wrote the chapter, but averaging more than $4.00 as I write this nowhave made it an expensive pastime rather than one of the cheapest ways to spend Saturday night. James Perron, the mayor who squared off with Elkharts cruisers in 1989, is now the director of project development for United Water in Indianapolis. He recently told me that he thought the cost of cruising had dampened its appeal, but so had technology. Cruising wasnt about driving, it was about meeting friends, he said. But social media may have taken the place of that. People have other ways of getting together. It doesnt have to be in person: you can find anyone on the Internet.