--Where were you when you experienced this event?

Baggott: Since I got this assignment a few days ago, my husband will randomly shout out things like: the death of Princess Diana and the costume malfunction of Janet Jackson and OJ's white Bronco on the LA freeway? And I've come to realize that I live in Baggottland––just south of Jungleland––and I receive dispatches from the real world via the wobbly negotiations of something like a carrier pigeon or singing telegram. "I don't know where I am at any given moment," I say. "I'm in my head, I think." And this is sad, sad, sad.

Borders: The year was 1970; I was seven years old and living in Keyport, New Jersey, a 1.4-square-mile parcel of swampland. I'd had crushes before––on Davy Jones, on Batman's sidekick Robin, and even, strangely enough, on the cartoon character Underdog. But nothing could have prepared me for what David Cassidy and the Partridge Family were about to do to me––emotionally, hormonally, music-fanatically––as they began to appear on the black-and-white TV in our living room each Friday night. (I successfully begged my parents for a color TV shortly after Partridge mania began.)

Flook: I was fifteen and traveled to Newport with my older hippie sister in her VW Micro bus. She had just left her husband and was doing this wild-ass reinvention thing. I was on probation for stealing cars in Wilmington, DE. It was this intense sister thing. We cleaved to one another! We picked up two hitchers, college boys from Kent State (two years before the shoot out), and I ended up sleeping with one of the guys in a sand dune. I had to remove my retainer when he kissed me, and remember to put it back each time so it wouldn't get lost.

Nelson: We didn't even have a decent television or reception, then. We were in a tiny town in Colorado that got exactly one channel. On it was whatever the regional
station manager declared worthy. Maybe that's why Watergate seemed so incredibly omnipresent.

Strauss: In the slow lane of a steep puberty.