This is no ordinary video.
In this 1989 video, Alice and Jerry Tobias, then 45 and 50, stand in front of a green screen at Disneyland, singing Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley & His Comets (1955). A date night activity, playful and staged, yet unabashedly sincere. A fabricated 1950s scene scrolls behind them, with vintage cars and dancing couples flattening history into a backdrop for a performance within a performance.
Alice and Jerry don costumes of the era: a big, felt poodle skirt and a pink sweater; a leather jacket, dark-wash jeans, finished with a cowboy hat. They play their parts well, almost blending completely into the generated scene behind them. The laughter and looseness of their movements, the way they turn and look toward each other, breaks through the polish. There’s an ease that signals a relationship shaped by love and compassion: one they would go on to talk about for decades after.
What gives the video its resonance is its temporal layering. The past is not remembered so much as reanimated. Rock Around the Clock, once a symbol of teenage rebellion and kinetic youth, is transformed here into a duet by a couple who only met later in life, revisiting youthful energy and imagining what it might have been like had they met decades earlier.
Viewed now, the tape reads as an artifact of optimism: about technology, about aging, about intimacy. It resists the idea that play belongs exclusively to youth. It suggests that love can arrive later in life and still feel electric, silly, and full of possibility, strong at one o’clock, steady at two and three, still dancing as the hours stack up.
What was once a disposable souvenir becomes, with time, a document. Not because it was meant to endure, but because it did. And in revisiting it now, by moving the tape from a drawer and into digitization, out of its case and out of obscurity, new meaning emerges.
Ordinary recordings transform into living history, shared now with children, grandchildren, and loved ones, proof that some things don’t fade when the clock keeps striking. They just find new time to be seen.