How Not To Act Old

Sometimes I think the young live in a different world from you and me. Not just, you know, one with lots more sex and lots less confusion over how to turn on the television, but a land where they watch, listen to, and know about people and things hidden to the rest of us.

For instance, I just got an email from my daughter with the subject line “Beth ditto” and this picture:

I was confused. At first I thought those people on the left were on treadmills in some Parisian version of a gym, following the lead of or perhaps getting inspiration from a very hefty workout instructor.

Because rock stars, especially female rock stars, aren’t allowed to be that fat, are they? Perhaps this photo was taken at a circus? Or at some kind of strip club for fetishists?

The one thing I couldn’t do was admit my cluelessness to my daughter, so I googled Beth Ditto, and discovered that she is a self-identified fat feminist lesbian punk rocker, lead singer of a group called The Gossip, from Arkansas. Being a lover of Arkansas, feminists, girl rockers, fat people in tight dresses, gossip, and — why not — even lesbians, I needed to know more.

I found some slightly off-putting photos.

But I also found this video in which Beth Ditto talks very intelligently about her style inspiration and her life. There’s also some great singing in there. And judging from the size of her audience, Ms. Ditto is actually quite well-known outside of suburban middle-aged New Jersey.

So now I feel like an explorer newly returned from the Land of the Young, where, like Dorothy Gale confronting the flying monkeys, I saw and heard things I maybe wasn’t supposed to see and hear. But instead of feeling scared, all I want is more.

In my never-ending quest for world domination to sell more books to make my readers’ lives even more wonderful, may I suggest you join a How Not To Act Old Meetup. If you’ve never heard of a Meetup, well, that’s all the more reason to hurry on down there because it’s a sign you might be acting old.  Meetup.com is a computer dating service for mature singles who want to get together for every kind of reason you might think of besides dating. 

So, yeah, you can get together with 16 other people who don’t want to act old and sit around reading sections out loud from the book and practicing them.  And then you can each go and start your own meetups with 16 new people, provided, of course, that you all buy copies of the book.  And then those 16 people can each go and…

Radical idea, I know.  I don’t think it’s ever been done.  But I think I may be onto an innovative way to get rich quick.

For now, there’s an existing How Not To Act Old meetup in (where else?) LA, and one pending in (wha’?) Des Moines. Plus that map below, like something in a horror movie, seems to be a living, breathing entity, with new potential meetups sprouting up all the time.

But don’t worry, there’s still a lot of open territory. Act now! First ten callers get a Bernie Madoff bobblehead.

It’s official: How Not To Act Old has been optioned by DreamWorks to be a movie or a television show.  This is obviously thrilling news.  I don’t think it matters one bit that my book has no characters, story, or plot: Neither does most of what’s out there!

What’s really important is who’s going to play me.  Michelle Pfeiffer is too thin, Halle Berry not funny enough, and Susan Sarandon — I hate to tell you, Sus, but you’re just too damn old.

Maybe Julia Roberts.  She’s got a big smile and a hearty laugh, just like mine, plus she looks a lot like me, I mean in the sense that we both have two eyes, two legs, hair, and lots of teeth.

To play my husband, I respectfully suggest George Clooney, who much resembles my guy with that full head of graying hair.  This picture of Julia and George looks a lot like me and Dick: he’s smiling, she seems pissed off.

Other top choice: Clive Owen. Why? Because I love him.  And because we macha babes need even more macho guys.  Here we they are in a typically tender moment, probably after tearing into each other like two testosterone-tanked tigers.

I’m hoping Steven Spielberg will direct. Or at least, Timothy Busfield. But the real thing I want to say to my new colleagues at DreamWorks: Send money.

So Chelsea Handler, my rival for the title of Bestsellingest Female Humor Writer, has upped the game by posing naked — yes, I mean totally nude, as in without any clothes — for Playboy.  She revealed a Godzilla-sized picture of herself on the magazine’s cover on Leno the other night.  Chelsea is obviously so desperately threatened by me that she has to resort to more and more extreme cries for attention:

I didn’t think it would come to this, but publishing has gotten to be such a rough game that authors will do anything to sell a few books.  And now, Chelsea leaves me no choice but to contemplate doing some nude appearances of my own.

I am working on a script I’m hoping to pitch to the talented folks over at Very Bad Porn.  Unfortunately, they already have a MILF film (first one down), but my story has more of a cougar focus.

I’m also considering simply posting some nude photos on the web, of course with a How Not To Act Old theme. and have been spending a lot of time researching what else is out there.  The competition is, uh, stiff.

I mean, I’ve been working out on my Exerciserig but how can I ever hope to be as buff as this woman?

Then there are those people who just seem so much more relaxed about their own publicly bare-assed selves than I could ever be, no matter what shape they’re in.

I take some comfort in the fact that my idols Nora Ephron and Tracey Ullman haven’t yet appeared nude.  But Chelsea has made it clear that not acting old, when you’re a female humor writer, means taking it all off.

I was going to enumerate everything I hate about Halloween, but just picture scary teenagers pounding at the door with cheap grillz on, the kids crying because their trick-or-treating companions ditched them, and Mommy face down in a bag full of chocolate.

Instead, I want to focus, young-like, on what’s unambigously good about Halloween, and that to me is Day of the Dead art.  One ever-renewing source for Halloweenish images is Daily Monster.  And then you’ve got your health-conscious vegetable skulls, from the really entertaining site Skull-A-Day:

You’ve got your psychedelic skull with butterflies coming out of it, particularly appropriate symbolically for How Not To Act Old:

You’ve got your x-ray photo of skulls tongue-kissing.

I wanted to use something like this for the cover of How Not To Act Old, but my agent, my editor, my publisher, my husband, my friends, plus that guy who sells milk down at the corner store all talked me out of it. Too dark, they said. Too ghoulish.

Still, to me, nothing says How Not To Act Old more perfectly — or seems more appropriate for Halloween — than a skeleton kicking up its heels. Here, the version of the cover that might have been, by the divine Jamie Keenan.

A funny thing happened when I went to Youtube this morning in search of an early Bruce Springsteen video, to post here in celebration of Bruce’s 60th birthday. I expected to find some rocking footage that would bring back the…..well, yes, the glory days of the Bruce I first saw in Milwaukee in 1975, the Bruce who was so sexy, so electrifying, that I left the guy I loved for somebody in my writing class just because he looked like Bruce.

Yes, that’s a testament to both the power of Bruce, and the shallowness of me.

Thirty-four short years later, Bruce is still hot, in my opinion, and so am I. In fact, if I were to take another writing class right now, and someone who resembled Bruce sat down next to me, I might find myself scanning for the nearest dark corner.

Plus I love it that Bruce said one of his heroes is Philip Roth because he keeps stretching and trying new things, plus I’ve heard from people who actually know him that Bruce is a genuine great guy.

But. Yes, there’s a but. As ageless and vital as Bruce seems to me, and as eternally turned on as he makes me feel, searching for the video was a fat fucking downer. All the new stuff was overproduced, commercialized, cheesy. It made Bruce seem like a modern-day Steve & Eydie.

And the old stuff, well, that just seemed so old. What’s here looks like it was shot through a hole poked in the bottom of a shoebox, or with the same camera they used to film Birth of a Nation. And Bruce’s voice, even his body, seems so undeveloped it only points up how steroidal he’s become.

So I dunno, instead of feeling celebratory, I’m left feeling as down as Bruce himself might be feeling today. Relive the beginnings of your love for Bruce at your own peril.

Dear Grace,

I just saw The September Issue, R.J. Cutler’s documentary about the making of last September’s issue of Vogue, and I’ve fallen in love with you.  Absolutely head over heels.  Before I count the ways, let me feature a picture of you in all your gorgeousness.

Look at the excitement and energy in those eyes!  Mwah, mwah!

Here are six of the 6000 or so things I love about you:

— Your long frizzy red hair.

— Your baggy black dresses.

— Your orthopedic shoes (much like my own).

— Your devotion to the aesthetics of fashion.

— Your willingness to fight for what you believe in.

— Your appreciation for both romance and reality, beauty and humanity.

Oh, and wait, most important of all, you combine a childlike creativity and a freshness of vision with a toughness rooted in maturity and experience — in short, what not-acting-old while also owning your age is all about.

I remember glimpsing you in the halls of Conde Nast and at fashion events when I worked at Glamour in the 1980s. You always looked strong, straightforward, earthy as well as glamorous, like someone I’d want to emulate.

I’m not the first one to peg you as the heroine of the movie.

But I may be the first one to talk about how striking it is to watch a staff of over-50 editors, including Anna Wintour, Tonne Goodman, Andre Leon Talley, and my old boss Phyllis Posnick, along with photographers like Mario Testino, rule the fashion world.  Teenage models may represent beauty, but those are old people behind the curtain, working the levers, defining the details, and (in the case of you, Grace Coddington), even buttoning the shoes.

As a fellow old person, and a professional one at that, I’m thrilled that the 50-and-60-somethings have all the power in the fashion world.  But if I were a young reader, I’m not sure how much confidence it would give me that Vogue had its manicured finger on the pulse of what was next.

But what you, Grace, embody and what you bring to the pages of Vogue is something that transcends fashion and age: It’s soul.  You may be manipulating matters of the body in the material world, but your vision springs from your spirit. Watch this pirated video of the most moving scene in the film to see why I adore you, and why everyone else should too.

Of course young people are happy: They have great bodies, they have lots of sex with other people with great bodies, and — well, do you really need any other reason?

And old people are happy too, because they raked in lots of money during the boom years and now they can live high on their investments while simultaneously bleeding Social Security dry.

The unhappiest group, according to a new Gallup poll, is 45 to 64-year-olds. Here’s the chart:

Why are the middle years so glum? The New York Times asked its readers, who came up with no shortage of theories.  Here, my digest of the Times readers’ 25 top reasons that life sucks for the middle-aged:

1. No time to recover financially from current disaster.

2. Baby Boomers are generally dissatisfied.

3. Pissed off that you won’t be as pampered as current seniors are.

4. Older boomers are greeedy job hogs, leaving younger boomers out in the cold.

5.  Too busy, plus sad about being anonymous paper-pusher.

6. Responsible for your own well-being as well as that of your kids and parents.

7. Persistent attacks on Social Security.

8. Realize everything you ever believed in is a lie.

9. Not enough healthy, short-term selfishness.

10. You’ve lost your job and you’re too old and expensive to get rehired.

11. Teenage daughters, dying parents, divorcing friends, health problems.

12. Friends domesticated into non-existence.

13. Guilt.

(Are you ready to kill yourself yet?)

14. The high cost of braces and college.

15. Hot young people call you sir (and m’am).

16. Job security undercut by ageism and sexism.

17. Can’t get a freaking date.

18. Realize you will never attain your dreams.

19. Sagging middles and bottoms.

20. Colonoscopies.

21. Realize that reaching material goals doesn’t satisfy deeper needs.

22. Tend to be Mets fans.

23. Resented by younger colleagues.

24. Not as glamorous as you’d like to be.

25. Not only is everything bad now, but it will be worse tomorrow.

Did we miss anything?  What do you think makes the middle years the unhappiest age?

Over on More.com, my post today is about How Not To Act Old on Facebook, offering some tips not in the book, which offers lots of Facebooking advice that’s not on this blog.

Why haven’t I blogged here about Facebook before now? For one, I needed to save lots of new and exciting stuff exclusively for the book.

Plus the truth is, the flood of people our age joining Facebook (women over 55 are the fastest-growing demographic) is extremely recent even as measured in blog time. Way back in the summer of ’08, when I started this site, nobody I knew was an active Facebooker. As recently as the fall of ’08, the brilliant writer and photographer Fran Liscio suggested I should subtitle the HNTAO book, I Hope They Have Facebook in Hell.

And then in early ’09, suddenly you and me and everyone we know were friending each other and updating our status (stati? statuses?) and posting profile pictures that featured not us but our kids or our dogs or our high school yearbook portraits or just that sad blank silhouette, because we still don’t quite have that Upload A Photo thing down.

Tip #1 for Not Acting Old on Facebook: Don’t Do That.

Once we work out the technological glitches, most of us learn very quickly to love Facebook. In fact, Time Magazine says that Facebook is even more perfect for the old than the young.

Bonus: Once you’re on Facebook, you can join the How Not To Act Old Facebook group and also send all your friends HNTAO Facebook gifts, like Grinding Lessons and Pet Rats.

The image below is by Stephen Wildish.  It must have seemed a lot more outrageous when it was done, in 2007, than it does now.

I had one of those dreams last night like people have in the movies — you know, dreams that so perfectly symbolize everything they’re doing and feeling that they can only be made up.

But this one was real.  In the dream, I came upon this old, rusty, leaf-filled Model T parked on a city street, facing (this is significant) toward the right.  I wanted to drive it, needed to drive it, but it looked so broken down I was afraid it might not even go.  So I enlisted the aid of a younger woman, a more able driver (I thought) to get it going.

I had the key to the car, but it was twisted, and then the key part broke clear off from the part you hold in your hand.  To make matters more difficult, I was supposed to fit this broken key into a slot in a hat I was wearing — push it right into my brain, I mean.

Even when I managed to get the broken key in place, and to get the car started, I was afraid I wouldn’t fit behind the wheel (the younger, thinner woman did).

But then I just tried, and lo and behold I fit, and I got the car into gear and onto the street, and then the younger driver kind of disappeared, and I was flying.  And I felt so happy that, despite being afraid everything was too old and rusty and broken and ill-fitting, I was able to take off.

Just like How Not To Act Old, on the NY Times Bestseller List for Week 2.  I think there’s gotta be a motivational speech in here somewhere.