PART A:
Please read the short essay called “Something from the Sixties” reproduced for you below. Feel free to make notes as you read if this helps you to understand it. Then, complete the following questions in complete sentences and paragraphs.
Something from the Sixties
By Garrison Keillor
About five o’clock last Sunday evening, my son burst into the kitchen and said, “I didn’t know it was so late!” He was due at a party immediately—a sixties party, he said—and he needed something from the sixties to wear. My son is almost fifteen years old, the size of a grown man, and when he bursts into a room glassware rattles and the cat on your lap grabs on to your knees and leaps from the starting block. I used to think the phrase “burst into the room” was only for detective fiction, until my son got his growth.
He can burst in a way that, done by an older fellow, would mean that angels had descended into the front yard and were eating apples off the tree, and he does it whenever he’s late—as being my son, he often is. I have so little sense of time that when he said he needed something from the sixties it took me a moment to place that decade. It’s the one he was born toward the end of. I asked, “What sort of stuff you want to wear?” He said, “I don’t know. Whatever they wore then.”
We went up to the attic, into a long, low room under the eaves where I’ve squirreled away some boxes of old stuff; I dug into one box, and the first thing I hauled out was the very thing he wanted. A thigh-length leather vest covered with fringe and studded with silver, it dates from around 1967, a fanciful time in college-boy fashions. Like many boys, I grew up in nice clothes my mother bought, but was meanwhile admiring Roy Rogers, Sergeant Rock, the Cisco Kid, and other sharp dressers, so when I left home I was ready to step out and be somebody.
Military Surplus was the basic style then—olive drab, and navy-blue pea jackets—with a touch of Common Man in the work boots and blue work…