Restaurant decor. I often try to reason by analogy, what an artifact like this must represent to Andrei (age 20) compared to me (age 53). It is true that the generational difference between us is foreshortened, owing to Romania's enforced technological and cultural retardation during the Communist era. Both of us, for example, remember that as very small children, we got to watch only a small number of TV stations that broadcast for limited hours each day and mostly showed boring propaganda, even though for me that was 1956 and for him it was 1989. But what of this old phonograph with its glorious brass horn? There was a more modest example in the house I grew up in, on the shelf of a bedroom closet. There was a manual coffee grinder up there, too, which I would really like to know what happened to because it would be useful when the power goes out up here. Anyway, doing the math, as an adult, when decades don't seem incomprehensibly long — centuries are getting to feel like you could hold them in two hands, for that matter — I am sure my mother regarded this as demonstrably out of date junk — like you would think of a PowerPC — as opposed to any kind of collectible, a word which was not used during the 1950's. You have to watch anachronistic words. I cringed when Larry McMurtry let one of the ranch hands in "Brokeback Mountain" use the phrase "bottom line". That is so not a cowboy word, unless it refers to some part of a show animal that the Wall Street folk were appropriating ironically, like "withers" or "steroids". If they could have thought in terms of the "bottom line" they could have moved to Denver and been done with it. So, yeah, Victrolas. Maybe they were using it in Iasi in 1980.