How Not To Act Old

So chuffed about the Wall Street Journal review of How Not To Act Old, which calls the book “as insightful as it is entertaining,” that I may stay up till 10:30 tonight and put an extra wedge of lemon in my seltzer.  Woo!

The Journal piece includes a book excerpt detailing what items of hipster gear you, I mean we, can get away with, and what we’d better leave to the young ‘uns.  So what do you think? RayBan Wayfarers with clear lenses:

Yay or Nay?  Head on over and read the excerpt at the WSJ to find out. Or better yet, buy the damn book!

Seven things you must never, ever do at the beach.  And none of them involve the wearing of a bathing suit that looks like these:

The Age Police strikes again, apprehending a middle-aged woman innocently dialing her cell phone with her index finger. And fixing to talk too loudly into it.

It was all over for me in 1987 — my youth, that is. At least that’s according to the musical quiz in the Chicago Tribune, which claims to pinpoint the moment you got old by zeroing in on the first year you fail to recognize summer’s biggest pop song.

I wouldn’t say not being able to hum along with the big summer hit makes you old so much as it makes you not young. In fact, this chart pretty accurately identifies when your adolescence started — mine was launched in 1964, with the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” — and when you became officially out of it.

Uncanny, because I well remember the summer of 1986’s big hit, Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” — yet could not hum along with 1987’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2 if you had a gun pressed to my temple. In fact, the only big summer song I really know from that point on is, sadly, the Macarena.

Makes sense, since in the beginning of 1987 we bought our first house, and our oldest child started school, and I had to make a lot of money. And it pretty much has gone on like that ever since. Hello mortgage and parenthood, goodbye songs of summer.

When did your youth end?

I was going to blame the suddenly-ubiquitous saying “50 is the new dead” on Joel Stein, because he’s the first one I saw tweeting it, but I don’t think he coined this week’s favorite catchphrase.  (Correct me here, Joel, if you dare.)

Googling the phrase yields 100 or so hits, most linked with Michael Jackson and Billy Mays, both dead at 50, though a couple date from earlier.  And on twitter, “50 is the new dead” was retweeted and chortled over thousands of times.

That’s going to mushroom even further, I predict, until everyone looks at you, if you’re over 50, with an expression that says: What are you still doing here?

Wait, that’s right, they do that already.  That’s what they really think: How come you’re making that big cushy salary and hogging that beautiful house when you walk so slow and keep forgetting what you were going to say and have that disgusting neck wattle?  Why don’t you shuffle off a cliff and leave the goodies for us bench-pressing, thumb-typing, baby-having young hot people?

What’s that you say: I’m paranoid?  Maybe, but when tout le monde starts equating your age with annihilation, it can make you a tad touchy.  You know, the way it would if a couple thousand people were standing around laughing and saying things like, “American is the new dead” or “Female is the new dead” or “Jewish is the new dead.”

Yeah, haha, not so funny.  This is not merely ageism; it’s a genocidal wish cloaked in a joke made all the more frightening by its bizarre social acceptability.

How to combat the murderous urges of the young?  Yelling is only going to make them want to kill you more.  Offering them money won’t work: They’ll just think how much sweeter things would be if you’d keel over and leave them all your cash.  They might want to keep you around to babysit when they have kids, but ultimately they’ll figure they can buy that kind of service cheaper at ten bucks an hour.

The ultimate revenge might be to keep on keeping on.  We hate to break it to you, kids, but not only is 50 not the new dead, for most people other than rock stars anyway, but neither is 80 or 90 or even 100.  We’re going to be around long enough for 50 to start seeming like the new adolescence.

Just when you think you’ve figured out How Not To Act Old, the Evil Young go and change the rules on you.

When I started this blog in the summer of 2008, the most flagrant old-acting I observed was people boring everyone at parties with endless talk about their grownup kids. Way back then, nobody I knew was on Facebook and Twitter was just an ugly rumor.

Then, by the time I wrote the How Not To Act Old book in the winter, women over 55 had become the fastest growing group on Facebook so I included an all-new section on How Not To Facebook Old.  (Sorry, it’s not here and won’t be — you’re gonna have to shell out the ten bucks for the book to learn how not to shame yourself on fb.)

And now the great age divide has been drawn on Twitter, the subject of my first How Not To Act Old blog on More magazine’s site — where I’ll be posting something exclusive every Wednesday — last week.  The idea of tweeting, seemingly broadcasting your moment-by-moment thoughts and actions, makes some people very nervous.  By some people, I mean people who, old-style, prefer to keep things private.

It’s not fear of the technology that makes the Old Acters Twitter-averse, I’ve decided, but fear of revelation.  The kind of thing that, a generation or two ago, made people (not my grandmother) pretend that those who’d done something bad to them (not my grandfather) had simply never existed.  In those days, if you didn’t talk about it — it including alcoholism, child abuse, sexual hijinks in the Oval Office — then it didn’t exist.

Teenagers, at one extreme, share nude pictures and blog about their periods and eating disorders.  Grandma, at the other, refuses to share anything more intimate than her meatloaf recipe — and then only with people she’s know a couple of decades.

The lesson: Open up.  Friend strangers.  Talk on message boards.  Yes, goddamn it, tweet.  Self-revelation, at least to the faceless digital universe, can take at least ten years off your persona.

For those of you too lazy addled busy to read all the posts on How Not To Act Old, we now offer lessons on video.  Directed and shot by Alexa Garbarino on location at Chelsea Square in Upper Montclair, NJ, the How Not To Act Old video stars Noah Levinson — aka The Funniest Kid in New Jersey — as the Age Police.  The fat old lady is just someone we found on the street, flagrantly violating HNTAO laws.  Look for new installments every week.

Either I’m the last person on earth to learn how to bake a chocolate cake in a coffee mug in just five minutes, or the first — well, the second — over 40 to get in on a “secret” that seems to be all over youtube, with cooking instructions by bespectacled hipsters and nine-year-old boys.

It all started about an hour ago, when I was sitting innocently at my computer, looking, as usual, for some action.  Along came my gal pal Deyna Detroit Vesey, the genius who wrote “I Wanna Be A Toys R Us Kid,” with her recipe for Dangerous Cake.

I thought it was a joke.  But not being one to turn my back on any promise of chocolate cake, I figured I’d try it anyway.  I assembled the ingredients:

and followed the very simple recipe contained in Deyna’s email:

4 tbsp flour

4 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp cocoa

1 egg

3 tbsp oil

3 tbsp milk

bit of vanilla

chocolate chips, if desired and available

Mix dry ingredients in a large, microwave-safe mug.  Mix in egg.  Mix in oil and milk.  Add vanilla.  Add chips (skipped those, but only because I didn’t have any).  Put in microwave for 3 minutes on high.  Remove.

And here’s what I got:

OMFG!  Looks like an actual cake!  The next step is to scoop it onto a plate, whereupon it looks even more real:

And how does it taste?

Before I tell you that, let me just take a moment to answer the other question that may have been nagging at you ever you started reading this post: What does baking this cake have to do with acting old?

Well, if you’re able to hop up and bake one this very minute, as I suspect half of you have already done, it means you’ve got a pantry and fridge stocked with all the necessary ingredients: pretty mature of you.  It also means you own a mug, a tablespoon, and a microwave: again, how grownup!  Plus, unlike your sylphlike younger sisters and bros, you’re probably the kind of person who’s up for eating homemade pastry. at 10 a.m. or 2 a.m. or, really, whenever.

Okay, back to your question about how the cake tastes.  Here’s your answer:

And yes, that’s why they call it Dangerous.

You there, with the coffee mug full of clear liquid, sipping vodka because you think it won’t make you reek of alcohol at your 9 a.m. meeting: I’m not actually talking to you.

No, this directive is aimed at all you casual Cosmo lovers, you Saturday night vodka martini drinkers, you Bloody Mary and vodka tonic tipplers.

You probably developed your taste for vodka way back before you really knew much about drinking, precisely because vodka didn’t have much taste.  You could mix it with anything — Gatorade, say — and manage to get efficiently wasted without gagging on any of those overly adult flavors.

Plus, vodka was the new liquor, freshly risen from the Russian gulag, the people’s poison.  Drinking it was revolutionary, almost.  In 1968.

Which is exactly why the Evil Young have turned their backs on vodka, which is now officially The Liquor of The 52-Year-Old.  So what, if you want not to act old, are you supposed to drink instead?

Gin is always groovy.  Likewise, most brown liquors, especially Woodford Reserve bourbon or rye, like your Uncle Stanley used to drink.  Tequila, not so much.  Basically, anything you’ve been drinking all these years is bad, and anything your parents served in the early 60s is good.

If you’ve been to a hipster bar recently, you know that mixology is the thing: Precious cocktails concocted from a drop of this and a dram of that.  Last week I went to the most uber-hipster of them all, Freemans Restaurant on the Lower East Side, and happily settled into the hunting lodge-style atmosphere — from before even I was born! –  and ordered a Freemans Cocktail.

Never mind that the bartender had, as the New York Times’ Frank Bruni put it, all the charisma of Cujo.  The glimmering gold cocktail standing atop the zinc bar beneath the stuffed deer’s head looked so poetic, I was moved to hop off my barstool to take a photo to send to my friends Hugh and Kim, who were supposed to meet us that night but had to go out of town.  See what splendor you missed?, I was going to say.

But when I sat back down, Cujo said to me, “I can’t have you taking pictures of the product.”

Wha?

“You can take pictures of yourself and your friends enjoying the place,” she continued.  “But you can’t take pictures of the product.”

Whether the “product” was the drink or the animal head or just the whole gestalt, I wasn’t sure, but of course from that moment on all I wanted to do was photograph the stupid place, which I immediately loathed, plus watch Cujo concoct my next Freemans Cocktail so I could broadcast its recipe.  So here’s the product:

Although you can find the recipe online in a more refined version, this is how the bartender actually made mine:

1 tsp pomegranate molasses (thanks to my son Joe, this is an item we actually have in our refrigerator)

1 jigger lemon juice

1 jigger simple syrup

2 jiggers rye

a dash of orange bitters

Shake over ice, strain into a cocktail glass.  Take a liquor soaked orange peel and set it aflame so closely under the nose of an unsuspecting guest that she screams.  Sip and feel instantly 20 years younger.  Or is it older?

Check out the latest How Not To Act Old post — on what all you’re doing wrong on Twitter — over at More magazine’s wonderful new site.  I’ll be posting an all-new, exclusive How Not To Act Old tip on More.com every week.  Plus, More is offering its readers a special discount on the How Not To Act Old book through Barnes & Noble.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the excerpt from the book in the July-August issue of More.  Love those dinosaurs!