To remind us that this isn't just drama based on a real event, it's based on real people, too, and their accounts of what they lived through, people only a few generations ahead of us.
It was 1948; they'd just lived through a war, but only on the edge of the action.
But, to those of us who lived through it, the only real… The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss, but lately he preferred to think of himself as a profession.
But, to those of us who lived through it, the only real New York summer occurred in 1977, when the city was ravaged by drugs, drugged by corruption, corrupted by murder, and murdered by ravagement.
Sorkin's masterful "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook," line pretty much sums up the collective ethos of an industry that's seen Friendster replaced by Myspace replaced by Facebook and lived through "RIP Good Times" to only see more good times.
Because, at 42, I have not only lived through the "big" 40th birthday, but I've also survived many disappointments and have come to realize that the grown-up life so many of us imagine as girls doesn't always gel exactly as we planned.
The maelstrom of the 1960's that has now engulfed him seems to have had little impact on him when he was actually living through it; only a recent conversation over the back fence with his pony-tailed, tattoo-covered next-door neighbor reminded him that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed the year before York's riots.
He was the last of the political generation that shaped post-war Britain, men and women who had not only lived through, and often fought in, the second world war, but who had also seen at first hand the terrible years of sustained depression of the 1920s and the 1930s.
These two men not only lived through different historical events, they also come from vastly different eras.
Had she only lived through the night, according to this view, she might have married Lawrence Selden, her soul mate, and reclaimed her place in society.
