Incipient Literacy (Isn't that a Boring Sounding Title?)

I think it dawned on me when I was a senior in college, sitting in a Spanish literature class. La profesora asked us what we knew of the Spanish Inquisition. No one raised a hand, until I, timidly, started talking about Tourquemada and the Auto de Fe. I quickly ran out of information. She asked me where I had learned about it, and I confessed, History of the World Part I.
All of my recollections of literacy center around popular culture. Big Bird made the cover of Time magazine the day that I was born. One of my earliest memories is of television: soldiers, in black and white. I think it's Vietnam. For some reason I associate it with Easter and marshmallow peeps wrapped in "tin" foil with a note. The bunny's handwriting is so like my mother's. Even though text, word, and memory are intertwined, it begins with television and popular culture. Written literacy first came to me via the Children's Television Workshop; I was invited to engage in cultural literacy by humming along to "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" on Schoolhouse Rock.
Television wasn't my only teacher; the records, stacked neatly by the turntable, brought me the world. Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, Auntie Mame-- I learned of lives and loves, the Russian pogroms and discrimination, Shakespeare and gang violence, the stockmarket crash and the (then) stigma of the unwed mother while singing along with the chorus. (And by the way, as a seven-year old, I think I made one heckuva Tevye.) I acted and sang all of the parts and transformed my living room into Anatevka, New York, Beekman Place. I unearthed the Bill Cosby albums and quite possibly did the worst white-girl mimicry in creation. But, as I was raised as an only child, Cos probably was the first to teach me a family literacy-- what's it like to have brothers and sisters?
It was, I think, in 1980 that my literacy changed. My father brought home a state of the art IBM PC. This baby had two 5" floppy disks, ran on BASIC, and a luscious green text on black screen. Later, my father would install a radically fast 1200 baud modem, but at first I was entranced with the world of GAMES. I played Grey Flannel Fun, Cat & Mouse (on the "compact" Compaq-- about the size and weight of a sewing machine), and the ultimate, Cave Adventure ("you are in a maze of twisty turny passages..."). Imagine going from typing on a typewriter, physically pounding keys that make inked indentations on a piece of paper, to typing on a keyboard, creating images, moving "icons" and things that aren't really there and opening windows that only exist in bits and bytes.
Literacy evolves...
(this post isn't done yet, but it's class time!)