... And Friends for Whom Formerlies Have No Use
The friend who is deeply hurt and thinks you would already know why if you were really her friend.
The friend who can"t even pretend to like your significant other and/or who can"t genuinely like your children.
The friend who points out that if you eat two Lean Cuisines you may as well have eaten a regular meal. You"re not an idiot. You"re a Formerly. You"re doing the best you can.
The friend who won"t come to your neighborhood at least half the time.
The friend who remains silent and allows you to believe everything is as easy as she makes it seem.
5.
My Friend Restraint.
A Formerly needs more than jeans in her closet, of course, but figuring out what works now that you"re in a new category of human can be tricky. So every time I go shopping, online or in person, I bring along my personal stylist, Restraint. She sounds like a big old p.o.o.p, but she"s not-in fact, she"ll take you clubbing, and you"ll have a rockin" time, but the next day you won"t be nearly dead of a hangover and hallucinating that you did it with one of the Ramones.
Here"s an example of her type of thinking: Wear a mini-skirt if you want. But don"t wear it with fishnets and platform pumps and a bustier and an MC jacket. With black tights, a fitted blazer and flats, you"re good. Restraint says I can pretty much wear whatever I want, and no single item is off-limits. I just don"t want to look like I"m dressing up like a teenager for Halloween, and Restraint helps me make that determination. What"s more, too much of any single thing on your person at any given time-whether it"s leather, sequins, Lily Pulitzer prints, self-tanner or Swarovski crystals-is no good. This is true for anyone of any age or life stage, but becomes even more important when you get to be a Formerly and can no longer wear wrist loads of bracelets and big hoop earrings and lots of rings without looking like a fortune-teller.
Restraint also guides me well when it comes to trends. She basically says to wink at a trend and maybe flirt a little, but no making out and certainly no full body contact. Whereas before, I might have embraced a trend-say, full-on vintage 1950s Doris Day-by donning a poofy, nip-waist c.o.c.ktail dress, bright red lipstick, pointy pumps and a handbag made out of wicker, now I"ll stick with my own look and maybe wave h.e.l.lo to Doris across the party (I"ll get just the wicker handbag, or just the pumps, but not the whole getup).
I see a parallel between the way I conducted my romantic life pre-Formerly and the way I shopped then. When I was single (which was until I was 34 and was on the verge of Formerlydom), I felt if a guy was nice or smart or interesting or came highly recommended, I should at least give him a chance. I was looking for love, and I didn"t know enough about myself to be sure of exactly what I needed in a partner, so I tried a lot of guys on, as it were. Over time, through trial and error and making the same mistake 12 or 30 times, I figured out what I needed, what I wanted and what I could live with. I also knew what I couldn"t tolerate, under any circ.u.mstances. This narrowed my field and eventually I found the "style" of guy that works for me. The one I eventually fell in love with and married fits in squarely with that style. Similarly, I tried a myriad of clothing styles and followed trends over the years until I developed a sense of what worked and what didn"t.
(I"m oversimplifying, of course. I dated the guy equivalent of blister-producing, toe-crushing pointy m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t stilettos way longer than was wise, and rolled my eyes at some well-made cla.s.sics that I probably should have tried when I had the chance. But you get the idea.) Knowing what works for you-in all aspects of your life, including relationships and fashion-is one of the fantastic things about being a Formerly. "You finally have some perspective on yourself," says my friend Alex, a fashion writer and fabulous Formerly living in France (Paris, natch!). "You have seen yourself in photos for 20 years, with five or six different hair trends, living through the preppy era, the punk era, etc. In that time, you come to realize, There"s a bigger me than all of these fleeting outfits and styles and moods and trends. As you get older and become a Formerly, you have a sense of yourself as more permanent than any of those things. That makes you a bit less of a fashion victim."
I totally agree. When I pick up Elle or Vogue, and am enlightened as to what"s "in," it"s a variation on something I"ve seen, and likely worn before. I know whether or not it works for me. Oh, look! Blue-and-white-striped shirts and wide-leg pants-they"re dusting off the nautical theme. I could never pull off that whole cute first-mate bit. Peasant dresses and gauzy blouses? Right. Boho chic. That I can work with. Shopping is a much calmer, less compulsive experience. "The big jeans that I wore in the "90s with the paper-bag waist-they didn"t look good on me," says Alex. "They"ve come back around again, like everything does. Sure, this time they are in a lighter fabric, with a higher waist, but it"s the same thing. I"m like, nope. I know not to mess with that, because I have some wisdom. All that other stuff, it"s fleeting."
As for me, let"s see ... I"m wisely steering clear of fluorescent colors, jeans with zippers on the tapered legs, T-shirts with block capital letters shouting "RELAX!" and anything that has been made to look distressed with a grain thresher or doused with acid.
I"m not saying that I need to wear the same thing year after year with no variation (and no fun) and now that I"ve found my style I aim to be buried in it. I"m just thinking it through before I throw myself like a fashion s.l.u.t at every trend that looks my way.
The whole vintage thing is a big mess now that I"m old enough to have actually lived through some of the eras being ironically re-referred to in fashion. Part of what makes vintage clothing so excellent is the contrast between the age of the outfit and the age of the person wearing it. A 20-year-old hipster boy wearing "70s polyester or a 30-year-old going a little Mad Men is hot. A 42-year-old woman wearing a fringed suede vest, a paisley blouse and bell-bottoms? Cue the ballad of the sad clown. It"s time to put those clothes back in the Salvation Army clothing pool and let some young chick discover the 1970s for the first time. She"ll think she invented it. It"ll be sweet.
Retro irony in general, Restraint says, should be left to those who didn"t actually eat Froot Loops as part of a balanced breakfast when Toucan Sam was still the Bruce Springsteen of cereal mascots. That means Formerlies such as myself are wise to avoid T-shirts with Sam, Mr. Bubble or Wonder Woman on them. Your own youth can be nostalgic, but only other people"s childhoods can be ironic. Oh, and I implore you to share this with any male Formerlies in your life. If he still has that Stones T-shirt from the Tattoo You tour and it miraculously still fits, he should feel free to wear it. But kindly discourage him from going to the Virgin Megastore and buying the reissue of the tee from a concert he once attended. That makes me want to cry. If his T-shirt looks 30 years younger than he is-because it is-there"s something tragic about the whole endeavor. He knows he was at the concert. It ought to be OK if no one else does unless it comes up naturally in conversation. It"s also OK to handcuff him to the radiator, if that"s what it takes to stop him from getting the shirt. Even if he doesn"t thank you for it, you"re still right.
6.
Unpopular Culture.
I didn"t want to get my daughters the American Girl dolls in the first place, mainly because they cost north of $100 apiece, and there was no predicting whether they"d wind up wedged between the bed and the wall like so many please-oh-please must-have toys before them. "No way. Not a chance," I said. But even as the words left my lips I had a feeling I was going to cave.
Sure enough, as fast as you can say, "Accessories sold separately," I did. I was no match for the instinctively manipulative campaign of cuteness my ladies launched. To save face (and money), I told them that (okay, okay!) if they could convince their grandparents to spring for them, I"d bestow my reluctant consent. The grandparents acquiesced, as grandparents are programmed to do.
In truth, by the time we were to place the online order, I was reluctantly grooving on the dolls, in particular the historical series. For those not familiar with the American Girl industrial complex, along with modern ones on skateboards with little schoolbags, they have a line of dolls of various ethnicities from different eras in American history, for which you can get storybooks, costumes and other accoutrements. There was Felicity, the one Vivian wanted, a plucky, horse-loving rebel growing up in colonial Virginia; Addy, an escaped slave, and Josefina, a Mexican-American from the southwest of the 1820s. I noticed some dolls from the 20th century, too, such as Rebecca, a Russian-Jewish immigrant in 1914 New York, and Kit Kittredge, the s.p.u.n.ky Depression-era reporter who Abigail Breslin played in the movie. Each came with a book about what it was like to be a little girl during her period in history. At least American Girl dolls are educational, I thought. Plus, they don"t have those poofed-up blow-job lips or wear hoochie outfits like the Bratz dolls my girls also crave.
I was talking with my friend Marisa about Felicity et al., and she mentioned that one of her daughters had the Julie Albright doll. I said I didn"t know about Julie; was she from the historical series?
"Oh, yes," Marisa answered grimly. "She"s from 1974."
Nineteen seventy-four? 1974??? Since when are the 1970s a historical era?
Sure, they were several decades ago, but history, as in, behind a gla.s.s case with a plaque on it at the Smithsonian, no way! The dolls are supposed to be girls of eight or nine. Guess who was around that age in 1974? Formerlies! Uh-huh. Marisa and I were seven in 1974. In the eyes of American Girl, and consequently millions of actual girls all over the country, the children of the 1970s are veritable historical figures who could stand alongside Sacajawea or Elizabeth Cady Stanton on a textbook time line in a history book. "Nineteen twenty: Women won the right to vote. Nineteen forty-five: The United Nations Charter was signed. Nineteen seventy-four: Your mother was seven."
I was appalled, but since Julie Albright had been doing macrame and staging love-ins in Marisa"s house for months already, her wound was not as fresh. She just sighed and let me rant. I looked Julie up on the American Girl website. She looks like she just stepped off the Partridge Family bus, with long, swishy, blond hair, sporting a white peasant blouse and bell-bottoms, with a braided, beaded leather belt and a crocheted cap. Marisa read the Meet Julie book that came with the doll to her daughters before bed the other night. "It talked about Billie Jean King and male chauvinist pigs. Her friend Ivy had a pocketbook made out of old blue jeans and she wore those Buffalo sandals I really wanted but my mom wouldn"t let me get! They mentioned mood rings and everything. Am I historical simply because I remember that stuff?"
I sure never thought so, but evidently we are. Did American Girl really need to point it out so starkly? They couldn"t have done a "60s flower-child doll instead, thus ensuring that little girls could learn about smoking dope and war protesting without insinuating that their moms were "historical"? Thirty seconds with a calculator could have told the American Girl R&D team that women who were girls in the "70s might have children of doll-buying age.
Of course, to a little kid, the 1970s may as well be feudal times. Sasha is always asking me things like, did they have taxis when I was a child, and did I have to make my own cheese, like Laura Ingalls in the Little House books I read to them? To my girls, for whom "the olden days" means any time before they were born, Julie"s world is as alien as Felicity"s.
Still, I"m the one with the credit card, not Sasha. I would not have had a problem with it if they had Julie in a line of dolls called When Mom Was Your Age or some such. When I hear Elton John singing "Bennie and the Jets" and realize that song came out when I was seven, I think, Sheesh, that was a long time ago. But it seems gratuitously callous to be relegated to the annals of history in a semi-official capacity by an outside ent.i.ty while I"m not only still kicking, but kicking a.s.s, thank you very much. Having a doll from one"s "historical" era feels like getting a lifetime achievement award, only-how can I say this clearly-I"M NOT THAT OLD!
Harumph.
These days, it often seems as if the main purpose of popular culture is to remind me of my age. But it wasn"t always so. When I was a kid, I listened to Carly Simon"s "You"re So Vain" time and again, wailing into my hairbrush. I got a huge thrill out of the line "I"ll bet you think this song is about you, Don"t you, don"t you?" Simon was accusing the subject of the song of having a swelled head, while at that very moment, she was singing to HIM! Get it? The song was about him! I felt so smart, so in on the joke. Cut me a break. I was seven. It was 1974. I"m told that"s ancient history.
That song, preceded by an abiding love for Ernie and Bert, was my introduction to the prolonged bear hug that is popular culture. I hugged back. I loved belonging to the community it created, and quickly found that listening to a person"s thoughts about the songs and ads and TV shows and movies that were lobbed at us with the speed and accuracy of a pitching machine provided a tidy shortcut into her head. What someone thought was cool, as well as whether she disavowed what she truly enjoyed in favor of what she was supposed to think was cool, told me a lot about how she saw herself. And thanks to the dizzying array of media (it seemed dizzying to me, even pre-cable and pre-Internet) I could chat with anyone, in the old-fashioned sense of the verb. Even on a torturous blind date in my 20s with the insurance industry lobbyist nephew of my stepfather"s college roommate, we shared a mutual bewilderment that Ace of Base was as popular as they apparently were. It didn"t a love match make, but the subject was our life raft until the check came.
Somewhere along the line, the bear released me from his hug. Now that I"m a Formerly, the song is most definitively NOT about me, a 42-year-old mom of two for whom it would be a bit pervy to cop to a favorite Jonas (Nick). I remember when I was but ten and even I knew that Lynyrd Skynyrd was a band, not a person. My mom, of course, did not, and earned an exaggerated eye roll from yours truly. Today"s Formerlies tend to be more plugged in than our moms were, but as you read this, I am positive that somewhere a Formerly is asking her kid if Franz Ferdinand is that nice boy in school who wore the lederhosen on International Heritage Day. That will be me as soon as my girls start liking music that didn"t originate on the Disney Channel. (I"ll save you having to Google it: Franz Ferdinand is not an individual but a Scottish band about which those who are not yet Formerlies are all atwitter, no pun intended. I only know this because someone mentioned them and I had to fake recognition until I could go Google.) The songs that are about me, or at one time were, are either being sung at hugely hyped reunion tours at stadiums across the nation, are being used in commercials for casino resorts, or to entice me to order the surf and turf for $9.99 at T.G.I. Friday"s. I get it now: Being a Formerly in pop cultural terms means that the sound track of your life is now playing on the lite rock stations, in the Sunday Night Oldies lineups or, if you"ve managed to keep an ear open to the semi-current, on the adult contemporary stations. You might hear a Muzak-ified version of songs you know while you"re waiting on hold with your cable provider, but you won"t hear it when you go into Forever 21 to get a gift card for your 19-year-old babysitter"s birthday. There, you will feel like an overstimulated old person. It will all seem too loud and discordant (even though some of the clothes are cute) and you will probably consider walking out and just writing your babysitter a check.
My own musical tastes were arrested sometime in my 20s. My theory on this is that all through high school and college, you are basically one gigantic, living, breathing, studying, angsting, Dorito-eating adolescent raw nerve ending, hooking up and getting your heart broken and learning that you were breathtakingly wrong about all that you thought you knew. That jacked-up feeling of betrayal and urgency and intensity is matched by songs about the same issues that you hear on the radio. It feels as if Tracy Chapman or Alanis Morissette or Depeche Mode have crawled up your brain stem into your head and are shouting out everything you couldn"t possibly express because you"re not as talented as they are. They get it! They get you! That"s what makes it "your" music.
Fast-forward to now. When someone asks me how I"m doing, and I stop to think beyond the knee-jerk "Fine," my answer is usually something like, "You know, good, thanks for asking." If I think the person really wants to hear about my life, I might add that I"m busy or stressed or tired and offer a few unthrilling details as to why, but that everyone"s healthy and nothing is horribly wrong right this second, so overall, I"m giving today a thumbs-up. Aside from the occasional miracle of birth or unexpected crisis, life is on an even keel and my fondest wish on an average day is for an extra hour"s sleep and more time to spend with the people I love. If I find I"ve dropped a few pounds without trying or discover a forgotten $20 in the pocket of the jeans I just pulled out of the dryer, it"s time to break out the margarita mix.
Now, imagine trying to set any of that to music; stability and contentment don"t make for great lyrics. Neither does compromise, a rendezvous with your mortgage broker about refinancing or a pa.s.sive-aggressive phone conversation with your spouse about who will stop for baby wipes on the way home. I could see it as a country song, albeit not a very good one.
But you know what? I"d much rather turn on the radio and feel a wee bit left out than still be living the kind of life people write songs about, at least the songs that have to do with alienation and cheating and that deep-seated f.u.c.ked-upness in a lover that can be mistaken for depth when you"re young and figuring it all out. Drama and upheaval are not constants in my life as they were when I was younger, and the relative stillness has let me revel in what I"ve built instead of constantly sweeping up after it"s been blown to bits.
"Our Lips Are Sealed" by the Go-Go"s is on my iPod, and I blasted it for my daughters in the car the other night. I squawked along with the lyrics, "Can you hear them, they talk about us, telling lies, well that"s no surprise." The girls loved it and wanted to hear it 30 times in a row as they always do, which kind of killed it for me ("But Mommy, could you please not sing this time?"). On the 29th go-round, I realized that I no longer do anything t.i.tillating enough for "them," whoever they are, to bother talking about, let alone lying about. I used to at least think I did. I see young women on the street now who have an air of being the center of attention, which of course makes them the center of attention. They step off the curb expecting traffic to stop, and it does! If I stepped off the curb now, traffic would probably stop because no one likes a lawsuit, but not because the drivers and I are all in agreement that because I"m young and invincible I own the road. What"s more, I probably wouldn"t step off the curb and take the chance that the driver wasn"t too busy texting to notice me and step on the brake.
I do not miss being the center of attention-it"s a lot of pressure, actually-but I do miss feeling relevant. If there ever was a "them," people I didn"t know who might nonetheless be interested in my comings or goings or thoughts or feelings, I am now 100 percent certain that "they" couldn"t care less. My friends and family, of course, remain interested in my point of view, and occasionally someone who is marketing a b.u.t.ter subst.i.tute or a new depression medication may ask me to fill out a survey. But I no longer have a sense that what I or my friends do is of vital interest, that it represents a rumbling under the surface of society that some writer might notice and remark upon as indicative of a new, potentially significant wave of thought. Mind you, it wasn"t as if I was called upon for my blinding insights on a regular basis, but I felt in-the-mix enough that if asked, I could add to the dialogue. Now I am simply off the radar of relevance.
But now that I"m over the shock of being seen as irrelevant by the nebulous "them," it"s no big deal. Most of the time, many younger people, especially the hip ones, seem to me overly conscious that they"re being talked about, which strikes me as more energy than I want to devote to such things. The less I think about what "they" think of me, the more time I have to think about what will make me and those who matter to me happy. Being a Formerly might look a teensy bit boring, if the observer applies only a cursory glance, the same kind of cursory glance that determines that a woman is no longer hot if she"s older. But from where I sit, there"s nothing boring about being a Formerly. And "they" won"t know that until they get to be one themselves.
All this being said, I"m not completely hopeless when it comes to current music. If a song is a national phenomenon or gets the Christian right all worried that our children are being recruited as lesbians, it"ll penetrate my distracted, disorganized consciousness. Still, by and large, the only things on the new music stations that sound familiar to me are the snippets of "old school" tunes that are sampled within the new releases. I"ll hear a Michael Jackson riff or the back-beat from a Grandmaster Flash song and for a second my heart leaps-I actually know that one! Check me out! Then the singer"s unfamiliar voice returns, and I see it was just a tease. Later, when the 20-year-old rapper appears on Live! with Regis and Kelly (what he"s doing on that show I have no idea, but then again, I"m watching it, and I have no idea why) I"ll find out that the stanza I knew was included because it was by his mom"s favorite artist.
Television is a bit easier to stay up on than music and movies, especially because I"m often too p.o.o.ped to go out in the evenings, and the advent of DVR technology means I never have to miss an episode of The Office or Mad Men. As a Formerly, I"m included in that pocket of pop culture-even targeted, because I presumably have money to spend on BMWs and FedEx and the other stuff that"s advertised during the breaks. (Hey! Is that Queen and David Bowie singing "Under Pressure" on that Propel water commercial? Why, I know that song! And coincidentally, I"m suddenly parched. ...) My friend Josie, who has been in bands since she could bang two pots together, takes it especially hard when one of her counterculture icons starts shilling for corporate America. Swiffer tends to score the best of old-school pop, but the list is endless. To name just a few, you can hear Iggy Pop for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Digable Planets for Tide and Squeeze for Dentyne gum. I get why Josie finds it disheartening, but we"ve all done things we never thought we"d do (mini-van with built-in DVD player, anyone?). I don"t think you can blame an aging rocker for wanting to cash in on a past hit. People have to eat, especially Iggy Pop.
What gets me is that Madison Avenue seems to think we Formerlies are soooo easy-and evidently we are! It galls me that I am, in fact, more likely to be favorably disposed toward a product if I a.s.sociate it with a cool tune from an era when I was cooler than I am now. It"s like crying at an obvious tearjerker-you feel manipulated and a little idiotic, while at the same time validated, if in a backhanded way. I know, let"s get these ladies to a.s.sociate our vile, smelly depilatory with a time in their lives when they weren"t working 55 hours a week and then coming home to follow a child and a dog around with a sponge before collapsing in bed with still-hairy legs. If the song speaks to them, they"ll unthinkingly grab it as they shop in their usual harried fugue state. The songs in these ads still speak to me. It"s just that before, when a song like The Cure"s "Pictures of You" spoke to me, it said, How precious and ephemeral is love. Now it says, Run out and buy an HP printer. (Yes, I own an HP printer.) I"m beginning to understand that the pop cultural divide between a Formerly and someone who is not is vast, and is as much of a marker of the pa.s.sage of time as any facial wrinkle or income bracket. Our facility with computers, of course, is a big, thick line in the sand between Formerlies and those that were born later. Formerlies are once again "tweens" vis-a-vis computer technology: too old to have been immersed in it when our brains were soft and absorbent, and too young to ignore it entirely, at least if we want to earn a living and function in society.
Occasionally I run into a (usually male) Formerly who still thinks it"s kind of neat that he is not charmed by technology, and proudly declares himself a luddite. (The original Luddites, of course, being artisans in Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution who felt they were being replaced by the advent of machines and so sometimes torched textile factories.) Nowadays, it strikes me as plain lame: There"s nothing cool or intellectual about not knowing how to do something. The IT guys sure don"t want to hear about it and I highly doubt it will get you laid.
When I was in college, few people had their own computers, and if they did, they were awkward, hulking behemoths with tiny glowing amber screens, and people had to bring their floppy discs elsewhere to print things out on that paper with the holes on the sides. There was something called a computer lab, but I never went there, having heard horror stories about senior theses vanishing into the ether just hours before they were due. People only a few years younger than us had computers in high school, but my contemporaries and I typed our papers.
I"m not proud, but even today, after years of using Macs and PCs for work and muddling through a blogging program for formerlyhot.com, my first instinct when I get that spinning rainbow beach ball of death (Mac users will know what I mean) is to smack the monitor, take a nap and hope that the problem resolves by the time I get up. There"s a chance I"d be that way even if I had my first keyboard to drool on when I was a toddler, like my daughters did.
But for the longest time, the sense of not knowing enough on a basic level to address even the most minor problem myself made me want to scream with despair. Sometimes I"d go to the "help" menu and find that I lacked even the vocabulary to look up my problem-"the little hand thingy won"t turn back into the arrow thingy" wasn"t in the index. It felt like I was being asked to learn an entirely new language, one that I didn"t have the time for, and one that would not enable me to order delicious food in a foreign country.
I"ve gotten more adept through sheer exposure, but even now, decades after MS-DOS, when something goes wrong in a big way, and I"m told that there is a new driver (I have no idea what that is) I can download to prevent the problem from occurring in the future, I feel like smacking the monitor again, because I know I will need help even with that. I hate feeling like I"m not adept at what has become as integral a part of daily life as putting a key into a lock and turning it.
A Formerly friend of mine, Rachel, who runs a magazine website, did make me feel a lot better about my tech reticence, though. "I started at a website at a time when no one knew what they were talking about," she said. "I saw behind the curtain, so I know that it all started as a bunch of people totally making it up." To an extent, that"s what"s still going on, which is probably why there"s an "update" every few weeks that you need to avail yourself of. Granted, Rachel is technically inclined, but her att.i.tude-that there"s no way to know everything, so you shouldn"t feel bad if you don"t-is one I"d be wise to apply to anything that feels like I"m too much of a Formerly to dip into.
But don"t for a minute think that I"m an Andy Rooneylike dinosaur who can muse for an entire segment about how many wrist.w.a.tches I own but never wear or who asks for my emails to be printed out for me so I can read them in hard copy. Unlike the stereotype of folks my mom"s age, I"m not fearful or dismissive of technology, even if I don"t see it as the extension of self that younger people often do. The problem is, I am barely able to find the time and the presence of mind to learn what I need to know to make the technology I already have do the minimal things I ask it to do, let alone explore the next generation of gizmo and all of its many features, the ones that the guy at the store a.s.sured me I could have so much fun with.
Fun. Hah! Let"s say I somehow miraculously have four hours budgeted for fun-fun for me primarily, not fun for the kids that will also be enjoyable for me. There are about 700 things I"d spend that time doing before learning how to use a new handheld device that I will probably drop in a Portosan at a Cheetah Girls concert. Coffee and a pedicure with a girlfriend I haven"t seen in months; a ma.s.sage and a leisurely trawl at a bookstore; seeing a movie with my husband that"s not by Disney/Pixar. You get the idea. That"s another way you know you"re a Formerly: if you simply want your gadgets to do the three or five things you need them to do and do them properly.
Of course, there are tech-minded Formerlies who are interested in technology for technology"s sake, just as I"m into clothes beyond the fact that they cover my naked body. And I love that, in part because they can explain it all to me when I"m about to smack my computer. But I"ll always be clawing my way up the learning curve. All of this technology made its appearance when I was already a grown-up and had everything well in hand. It basically stood there like a stubborn child with its lip out and insisted I drop everything and learn how to use it. In the early 1990s, someone who didn"t check with me first decided that ca.s.sette tapes were no longer good enough and that everyone had to convert to CDs. Remember that? It seems quaint now, but aside from a gnarled mess of an overplayed love mix from a high school boyfriend, I didn"t understand why I had to go out and buy CDs of the same music I already owned. Now that there"s a new thingy I supposedly must upgrade to every other week, you can see as I might be a bit annoyed.
One could argue that another sign you are a Formerly is the degree to which you are thrown for a loop when websites you like are "upgraded" beyond recognition. My Formerly friend Melissa O., who ran the site for a magazine I used to work for (but nonetheless is stymied at having to make a conference call, which makes me perversely happy), says that after a redesign, people Formerly age and older are less likely to come back. "Even if the site is better and easier and clearer, she"s thinking, I can"t find that one thing I used to love to do. A teenager will take the time to visit again and explore."
Well, exactly. Not only does that teenager have far more time to screw around on the Internet looking for neat sites than I do, but if surfing the web is not part of a Formerly"s job or something she finds relaxing, odds are, she"s online to stay in touch and do her business. I mainly go online to read news and blogs, to shop and to get information for stories that I"m working on. The only pure fun I have is on the ma.s.sive timesuck that is Facebook. And predictably enough, when they redid their site after I"d been on for a few months, I felt like someone had come into my house, rearranged my underwear drawer, hidden all my everyday bras and panties and replaced them with wedgie-inducing thongs and impractical lingerie that was for someone with b.o.o.bs that stayed up all on their own anyway and so didn"t need it.
I whined about it a fair amount (on Facebook, of course, because there was no way I was going to learn how to use another social networking site) and many Formerlies agreed with me. Others accused us of being resistant to change, and told us to get over it. They weren"t wrong. I did sort of feel like I was turning into my grandparents. They"re gone now, but they used to become terribly anxious when their routines were disrupted. I kind of understood why even when I was a kid: They"d lived long enough to know what worked for them, and they didn"t relish any added challenges. When the little things, like getting in and out of your gigantic mauve aircraft carrier of a Lincoln becomes more difficult, some valet changing your radio station can be unnerving. Until you find the Perry Como station again, it feels like someone has f.u.c.ked with your sense of reality just a little bit. And if the Publix runs out of your favorite brand of gluten-free dinner rolls, that can knock you flat on your a.s.s for a good half hour, and require a therapeutic rehash (or several) with your wife of 50-plus years.
I"m not set in my ways to the degree that my Lincoln-driving, Florida-living, gluten-free-roll-eating, Loehmann"s-shopping, Bronx-transplanted grandparents were. But I"ve got enough on my plate that when the things that are supposed to be relaxing require that I read instructions, I get cranky. It took me fully three months to not miss the "old" Facebook, and then they changed it on me again. I know I"m supposed to roll with it, but becoming a Formerly is change enough for now.
7.
Formerly Famous.
As long as there have been TV sitcoms, there has been the goofy TV dad trying to appear cool for his kids by using ridiculously dated catchphrases, or rendering current catchphrases ridiculous simply by virtue of the fact that he"s using them. The can"t-miss message is, once you"re a Formerly, you should stop saying things like "It"s da bomb," "Fierce!" or, worse, "Talk to the hand," because you"re only highlighting the convention centersized gap between you and the young person you"re trying to connect with.
I"m simply not in contact with enough cool people to even pretend to keep up. The fact that what"s cutting edge in technology and music and film and catchphrases seems to turn over much more frequently than when we were in our 20s and 30s might just be that phenomenon of time seeming to pa.s.s more quickly when you"re older, or perhaps it really is spinning that fast-black, white and red all over like a penguin in a blender.
Still, the first time it hits you that you are on the outside of pop culture looking in, it can be startling. Here"s what happened to my friend Kathleen, who is a political consultant. Last year, Kathleen was checking out a video Nancy Pelosi"s office posted on YouTube. Right in the middle of it, the sound of a record needle scratching against vinyl could be heard, and then the unmistakable strains of "80s pop singer Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up." Astley himself then made a brief appearance in acid wash doing that little side-to-side hair-floppy "80s dance before the video faded out to a picture of the Capitol, lending the whole thing an air of official dignity and understatement.
Kathleen sat in wonderment. Her cubemate, a man in his 20s who is fond of retro attire, smiled and said, "s.h.i.t! Pelosi"s been rickrolled!" Kathleen hadn"t the foggiest, although of course she remembered the song. "She"s been what?" He patiently explained what the term meant: that some wag manages to tape over your YouTube submission with a Rick Astley song. It"s a playful form of video vandalism utilizing a washed-up Formerly Famous pop star from the era before there was an Internet. Rickrolling is now what Rick Astley is most famous for, and all he had to do to be resurrected from the Where Are They Now? cold case file was absolutely nothing.
In any event, Kathleen was appalled to find out that the term "rickrolling" has been in widespread use since 2006. "But I pay attention to popular culture," she protested. "I can"t believe I"ve never heard it!" He shrugged and swiveled back to his computer.
I"d never heard of rickrolling, either. But that"s not the point. The point is in what Kathleen said: "But I pay attention to popular culture!" You only have to pay attention to pop culture if you are not part of it, if you are on the outside looking in and thus must make a conscious effort to learn it, as if it were Swahili. When you"re young, pop culture sinks in through your pores like the UV rays and free radicals that will someday make you look old. What makes you a Formerly is not ignorance of popular culture. It is the initial denial of your ignorance, and then the indignant reaction to your ignorance, because you pride yourself on not being ignorant, G.o.dd.a.m.n it. As if being a Formerly can be overcome by good, old-fashioned American industriousness.
Which it cannot. To a degree, that ignorance can be diminished somewhat, if you work at it. Whether it"s worth the time and effort it takes to stay au courant as a Formerly, when the figurative song just plain isn"t about you and there is going to be a new song that isn"t about you every week, is a tough call. Few Formerlies have the time, especially if they have children. I used to see a movie a week. Now, whenever there"s a movie that sounds good, I go from missing it in the theater to missing it on cable, to having it expire off the DVR before I have a chance to watch it. By the time I remember to get it on Netflix, it"s been out over a year, several people have ruined the ending for me and the universe is abuzz about an entirely different film I"ll probably not see any time soon.
On the one hand, you want to feel in-the-know enough to be able to discuss things like what"s "heating up the blogosphere" and the decline of print media and use words like "app" and know texting acronyms like "IMHFO" without having to look them up (like I did when I first saw it ... In My Humble f.u.c.king Opinion, in case you were wondering). And of course, you want to employ any technology that will truly make your lunatic life easier. On the other hand, you may just want to close your eyes and wait for the next wave of technology or music or film to wash over you, and maybe ride that one. Or not.
Another option is to band together with other Formerlies and form your own little pop cultural bubble, where the measure of coolness is not whether you have heard the latest cutting-edge band or have the newest application for your iPhone, but the depth of knowledge you retain about the individual members of the cast of Full House. Finding that bubble is one of the big reasons I love going onto Facebook, along with discovering that we all worried about the same things in high school, even as we all thought everyone else was living the perfect life. What can I say? I was really sad when Bea Arthur died. There was always Maude and then all of a sudden there wasn"t. I hadn"t recently thought about the feminist G.o.ddess with the long cardigans I watched as a child who set the stage for my mom to grow up and grow a pair and strike out on her own, but I was glad to be able to join a Bea Arthur fan group on Facebook and read about the cool stuff she"d done. If this makes me a loser, I"m fine with that. Apparently I"m in good company.
Whether or not you care that you"re largely left out of pop culture naturally depends on whether you ever valued being in-the-know or relevant in the first place. I did, but as a private citizen. People who were once famous seem to find it unbearable to be so excluded, which is probably why so many of them agree to be on shows like Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew or the one that was all about Scott Baio and his Peter Pan syndrome. I cannot tear myself away from even well-worn repeats of those VH1 reality shows, the ones in which celebrities who are known for something they accomplished a long time ago interact in front of the cameras like organisms in a petri dish. The format is pretty standard: Place a Formerly Famous person in ludicrously contrived situations with other Formerly Famous people and tape them bonding or else clawing one another"s spray tans off in exchange for a chance to get their names out into the public consciousness again (and thus, hopefully, reverse their Formerly status).
The Surreal Life included Erik Estrada from CHiPs, the Go-Go"s Jane Wiedlin (as cool as you"d think), the late Tammy Faye Messner (cooler than you"d think), Vanilla Ice (even less cool than you"d think), female wrestler Chyna, Charo and many other random folks living in various houses together, trying to demonstrate that they are more than their personas. There is also a Formerly Famous weight-loss show, Celebrity Fit Club (on which we learned that the guy who played Screech on Saved by the Bell is not a nice person), Confessions of a Teen Idol and the low-rent Bachelor knockoffs starring Flava Flav from Public Enemy and Poison"s Bret Michaels. On Rock of Love, Michaels fondled his way through a throng of grown-up groupies, perpetually surprised that it was so hard to divine which of these large-breasted, scantily clad women calling one another b.i.t.c.hes and liars really loves him for him, you know?
Ridiculous as they are, I had to ask myself why I watch these shows. I think a big reason is because I want to see how the Formerly Famous trying to regain their fame are coping with getting older. Aside from the fact that being older means you have less time before you die (which, let"s face it, sucks), I wouldn"t want to be the person I was in my 20s. I"ve built a better, more fulfilling life now than I ever had when I was young and hot (i.e., considered hot by people who don"t already know that I"m beautiful on the inside). I wonder if the celebrities on these shows feel that way? Are they handling getting older any better than I am? With their entirely redone bodies and the fact that they clearly don"t have much going on or they wouldn"t see shows like these as a good opportunity, they don"t seem like the likeliest crew from which to be learning about aging gracefully.
Then again, wisdom often comes from unlikely sources. Staring at the screen has taught me that clinging desperately to what you once were is conduct unbecoming to a Formerly, as is taking yourself too seriously-both are far worse than any wrinkles, even those unsightly hash marks between your eyes that make you look perpetually p.i.s.sed off. Botox can relax those away if they really bother you. But there is no injectable to help the Formerly who argues with the maitre d" at The Ivy that he should get a table near Harvey Weinstein because he was once on Charles in Charge. That person is not aging gracefully. The one who wonders how it is that she"s about to do a weigh-in on national television with Marcia Brady, laughs and does it anyway is, in my view, getting older with the right att.i.tude.
Aside from getting to see what bizarre things famous people do when they"re supposedly being themselves, these shows are about watching the people we grew up watching trying to figure out what happens when you"re no longer what you were-and finding they have no more idea than the rest of us. I"m not sure why it"s comforting that mall queen Tiffany is as confused as I am, but it is. If, like the better-adjusted inmates of these shows, we can view the Formerly years not as the sun setting on our potential, but as a shot at being who we are now, this time with a sense of humor, we"re in good shape. Pa.s.s the Cheez-Its.
My sense of humor on the subject of no longer being young is getting quite a workout. I remember a work party I went to maybe two years ago. Because magazines tend to be peopled mostly by folks under 30, I was not shocked that most of the music played was completely foreign to me. Naturally, the young a.s.sistants and a.s.sociates all knew and loved the songs the DJ was spinning (although, of course, he was spinning nothing, because one cannot spin an MP3 file). They squealed in unison, shouted the name of the artist, dropped their forks and pulled one another onto the dance floor, swaying in rings of fabulousness, their sky-high heels apparently no hindrance to their perfect music video moves. These girls (or women, as I, too, preferred to be called when I was a girl) were gorgeous, joyful and incredible to watch. I sat back with a few other relative dinosaurs, finished everyone"s dessert and enjoyed the show.
I wasn"t aware I"d been feeling left out until the DJ cued the inevitable "80s and "90s oldies medley-the set included Cameo or Bel Biv Devoe or Salt-n-Pepa-but perhaps I was. I only knew that my body had muscle memory of moving to this music at some point in history, and was aching to do it again. I grabbed my boss, who is also in her 40s, and we wedged ourselves in among the chicas. Yes, I"d had a few, and some unconscious part of me likely wanted to demonstrate that I had busted quite a move in my day. (That would have been right during the 30 seconds in 1989 when using the expression "bust a move" wasn"t patently laughable.) Before I knew it, I was breaking out some of my very best dance steps from the vault where they"d been stored roughly since Bill Clinton was in his first term.
I daresay I was doing OK. A crowd of a.s.sistants surrounded me and my boss, and, my audience clapping encouragement, I let loose. Nothing fancy, but if Madonna did it in her "Vogue" video, I felt free to employ and even embellish. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a young man (who of course was gay and worked in the art department) mirroring me. He danced his skinny, 24-year-old b.u.t.t on over and we clicked together, the perfect match, improvising and freaking each other and role-playing, and it was wild. I felt ever so slightly bada.s.s.
But just as he was getting all up behind me and pretending to grind, I had a split-second wave of horror: Is he dancing with me because I"m such a good dancer and just buckets of fun? Or is he mocking me, "dancing" with me in quotation marks, like we used to do The b.u.mp or The Hustle with those who came of age in the disco era?
What if I was dancing sincerely, while he was dancing ironically? How potentially humiliating!
As soon as the thought entered my brain, however, it departed, leaving a big So what? in its place. Who cares if he was dancing with me because I"m a great partner or a great comedy act? We were both having fun, and being a Formerly means that it doesn"t matter if it"s at my expense. The days of having ego enough to be potentially humiliated are over, so even if I"m sort of the joke of the dance floor (and I"m not convinced that I wasn"t), I"m just happy to be in on the joke. Unlike when I was young, there is no way I"d let what I looked like having fun inhibit me from having fun. If the song"s about me-say, something from, I don"t know, 1974, or better yet, 1987?-great. If not, but it"s got a beat, I can still dance to it!
8.
The Comfort vs. Style Smackdown.
When shopping for clothes that stylishly bridge the gap between too young and middle-aged frump city, neither of which will work for me, I regularly encounter salespeople who do not understand how narrow and precarious that bridge really is. A misguided or too aggressive nudge from one of them can knock me right off that bridge into the troubled waters below, and I wind up looking terrible.
On the one hand, there"s "the helper," who is ever-ready with a suggestion about a style that might "flatter" my "mature" figure or camouflage a "problem area" that I hadn"t thought to consider a problem before she brought it up. On the other, there are the outright liars, who say I look good in an outfit better suited to Miley Cyrus. What can be even more humbling is the empathizer, whom I encountered when trying on a cute but unsupportive bra. So much of my left breast spilled out over the top that I could have used a third cup to catch the overage. Handing her back the bra, I joked about how sometimes our bodies don"t cooperate with our sartorial desires. "Oh, I know! It"s like, my shoulder blades are so pointy!" she said earnestly. All I could say was, "Yes, well, that can be a real problem," before getting dressed and deciding not to shop at her little boutique again.
Clearly, finding clothes that match my new life, which I"m still getting used to, is not simple. When I look at what other Formerlies on the street are wearing, I mostly see women who fall into one of three categories: 1) Those who are trying too hard to look younger than they are. I"m thinking if your C-section scar is visible over your jeans, they are too low. And those shorts and sweats with writing on the a.s.s tend to draw the eye to the a.s.s-something I"m avoiding these days. I"d like to think my a.s.s speaks for itself.