Tag: boomer

A Quick Trip with Leonard Cohen

I can see the room.  It’s a little scruffy and smells like pot and incense. (Yes that’s a cliche but there you are.)  There’s a mattress on the floor, crazy Berkeley posters on the wall, a turntable and speakers, one window over the bed, another on the long wall.  Lots of bookcases, record albums, a coffee grinder for stems and seeds, a big old stuffed chair, and us.

It was a long time ago.  Hasn’t crossed my mind in years.  Then, right there, on the Spotify singer-songwriter channel, comes a young Leonard Cohen singing this:

Music is dangerous.  Suddenly I was back in Massachusetts almost half a century ago, when Suzanne, and Sisters of Mercy too, were part of my lexicon, along with everything from Milord

to Ruby Tuesday

to Blowin’ in the Wind.

Years ago Garry Trudeau published a Doonesbury thta included the line “You’ve stolen the sound track of my life!”  I don’t remember the context but it’s disconcertinly accurate, as he usually is.   Every song is a movie of the past, running — sometimes joyously, sometimes with enormous sadness, in my head.

It was such a different time, full of righteous anger and, at the same time, joy at being alive, sometimes in love, always part of the changes taking place all around us, many at our instigation.

Now, as we face the rage and disappointment of many of our children and their peers, it’s kind of heartbreaking to look back with such nostalgia at a time that they clearly see as debauched and destructive and, even worse, egocentric and selfish.

It’s paricularly hard when these songs rise up, so transporting.  Everyone, if they’re lucky, has fond recollections of the younger times in their lives.  But for me, as the music carries me there, it was so much more.  Hope, freedom, equality, beauty, love and peace — every song an anthem moving us forward.  And  lovers in a scruffy dorm room, a little bit stoned, listening, and sometimes, singing along.

Days Before a Son Marries; Mothers-in-Law Get Jittery Too

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These two sweeties will be married on Sunday.  One of them is my son.  My first born.  My baby.  I don’t know why I’ve been so reluctant to write about it; it’s a beautiful relationship and a joyous moment in all of our lives. But I have been silent, or almost so, about it for some time.  Can’t seem to let myself write.  My sweet friend Karin Lippert, noting my cryptic tweet, wrote:

Congratulations… mixed emotions are the new normal, the new black? No, we have all always had overwhelming,wonderful emotions about our kids…

She’s right, I guess.  The mix isn’t between wishing well and not so well, it’s between joy and respect for the place these two have found together in the world, and my profound sense of time passing, and of change.  I’ll keep you posed when I can.

BLOGGING BOOMERS #93 AND I’M HOST. ELECTION POSTS AND LOTS MORE

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From here in Washington, DC, nerve center of exhausted political junkies and traumatized McCain supporters comes this week’s Blogging Boomers Blog Carnival.


Those two Fabulous After 40 gals (who are fabulous) remind us that if we think we might be shrinking "You’re right.  Starting at 40 we lost half an inch in height every decade."


What’s a boomer gal to do, other than wear high heels? Check out
Fabulous after 40 for fashion advice on How to dress to look taller.

John at SoBabyBoomer has found a new study has found that women have a
greater variety of bacteria on their hands than men do.  So, he wonders,  "Should guys worry about holding hands with
women?  Find out at SoBabyBoomer.com

Maybe those germy women would feel better if they knew how to manage in today’s economy?  If, so this week’s Vaboomers is for them.  They’re sponsoring a free seminar: How to Manifest What You Need in Difficult Times" for women coping with the current economy.
 

The Midlife Crisis Queen has something different on her mind: 

We
make all kinds of mistaken assumptions about the opposite sex when it comes to
sex.  Here’s some wrong assumptions made by men  and here’s some made by women.   

Boston’s own Rhea Becker, like most of us, still had the election on her mind.  As she says "History was made this week.  A baby boomer was elected president of the United States.  Learn more at The Boomer Chronicles.

Also with elections on her mind, Janet at Gen Plus shares her reaction to Obama’s acceptance speech.  And, like any of you, yes….she wept.

Meanwhile, over at LifeTwo, we’re getting some exciting ideas:  The key to happiness, according to university researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the concept of "flow."  Flow are those activities in which you are so deeply involved that you feel outside reality. 

As usual, I Remember JFK has a great social memory to offer:  TV Trays.  "The living room of the 1960’s was a warm, friendly place.  True, times had changed since our parents might have first purchased our modest homes fifteen or twenty years prior.   Most living rooms in the US had a new center of attention: the television set.  That one-eyed monster changed the purpose of the home’s central location from a place of casual conversation, or possible listening to the radio, to the spot where our parents unwound after a long day at work, accompanied by a cocktail, Walter Cronkite and a TV dinner.

Thankful for new leadership in the land, Dina at This Marriage Thing challenges us all to bring that same feeling home with the Gratitude Project.  I’ve actually been there – it’s pretty cool.

Oh and if you can stand one more election post, here’s mine.  It’s about having been in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention riots, and watching Obama accept the presidency on that very spot.

 


Now Is the Time: Martin Luther King, Neshama Carlebach and the Green Pastures Baptist Church Choir

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Every year we celebrate the birthday of
Martin Luther King in a joint concert between our synagogue and Reverend Roger
Hambrick and his New York-based  Green Pastures Baptist Church Choir.  DC and New York, white and black, Jewish and Christian… we gather to honor the holiday for
this man who meant so much to all of us.  This year, the choir was joined
by the legendary Neshama
Carlebach, daughter of the revered Sholmo Carlebach and a talent in her own
right.

It’s a strange thing really – Orthodox Jews
and Bronx Baptists dancing in the aisles singing Kivo Moed — Now is the
Time… quite remarkable.  It’s always moving – and no
less so tonight — just not much original to say about it.  Just take a
look and enjoy it for yourself.

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Then stop over to this week’s boomer blogging carnival.  It’s fun to read and I am really enjoying being part of it.

WILL YOU STILL NEED ME, WILL YOU STILL….??

My older son used to shave his head. He’d lost lots of hair on top anyway so just shaved all of it off and looked way cool. I used to tease him that he needed an earring too but he said he was his own kind of rebel – being the only person to graduate from his free-spirited university with "no new holes." He’s always been his own self. Very cool, he and his equally groovy brother have kept me up to date with what’s new in music, books, film and world view.  They are, honestly, two of the most interesting people I know. But I digress.

Thursday night at a Thanksgiving dinner in his new, very beautiful condo, he started talking casually about his grey hairs. GREY! Then his [younger] brother chimed in about "a couple" that he had. Now this is not easy. If my children have grey hair what does that make me? Not to be selfish or anything but it’s kind of disconcerting.

Cks_1967ish_1 Aging is inevitable and I’ve been fortunate in my progress along this continuum but when your kids begin to demonstrate the passage of time you have to take a deep breath and accept it.  I just read a piece in the New York Times about Baby Boomers refusal to join AARP.  I can relate to that.  My PARENTS  belonged to AARP.  No thanks.

Yeah — that’s me just above here.  I think in 1967.

I feel about as silly as Peter Pan ( I won’t grow up. Not a penny will I pinch. I will never grow a mustache, Or a fraction of an inch. Cause growing up is awfuller, Than all the awful things that ever were.  I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up, No sir, Not I, Not me, So there!) but that doesn’t change my mind.

An old friend used to say "Call me adult anytime you want; just don’t call me a grown-up."  I guess that’s how I feel.  Counter-cultural and generational identity is strong in people my age and I feel it particularly.  I did dozens of Boomer stories when I worked at the TODAY SHOW – including a series when Boomers (including me, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Ben Vereen, Donald Trump, Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn and Cubby O’Brien) began turning 40 in 1986 and an entire year of anniversaries of 1968 in 1988.  I am formed and INformed by the time of my birth and have always known it.  I joke that I’m a "walking demographic" but it’s true.

SO.  I will handle the grey hairs on the beloved heads of my beloved sons.  I pray for and wish them well in their own journeys and am more grateful than I can describe both for them– and for the experiences of my own eventful life.  And that’s not bad — not bad at all. 

TRY TO REMEMBER — THE FANTASTICKS, JERRY ORBACH, THE INTERNET AND ME

OK – so I should be used to it by now.  I’ve been — as I often say, a walking demographic Baby Boomer as long as I can remember.  But on this morning after the re-opening of THE FANTASTICKS*  – which ran off-Broadway for 42 years, I read "adults 55+ adapting online."  Of course they are — sooner or later whatever I’m doing becomes part of a generational wave.

Don’t worry – there IS a connection.

I saw THE FANTASTICKS  with my college room mate and her mother during fall vacation of my freshman year.  That was 1964 – four years after it opened.  At the end, all of 18, I was crying so hard that the woman sitting next to me – probably 25 or s0 – handed me the rose her date must have given her at dinner.  I kept it on the wall of my room for years. 

El Gallo — the irresistible seducer  and originator of the "hurt’ without which "the heart is hollow" —  was first played by Jerry Orbach.  [hear him sing Try to Remember here.]  I met him when I was close to 50 – and told him I’d seen the show when I was 18.  His face just changed – not a trace of Lennie Briscoe but a combination of affection, nostalgia and pleasure.  We spoke a bit more and then I apologized for approaching him at a reception and acting like a groupie.  He replied "You saw the Fantasticks when you were EIGHTEEN!  That wasn’t an interruption that was a pleasure."  So I guess the story had the same impact on the cast that it had on girls like me.  "Please God please," the young girl ("the girl") cries out – "don’t let me be NORMAL!"  That was me alright.  Please let me be singular – not like the others! 

Well it hasn’t turned out that way.  Whatever I come to, my peers hit within a year or so.  It made me a great talk show producer – never a visionary too far ahead to be relevant, just enough ahead to know what story to do next.  I guess that’s why I accommodated to my role as close enough to normal but with an edge — rather than the downtown woman I had once wished to be.

I knew about this headlong Boomer journey online because my older son, in the industry, had read a similar study.  Last weekend I told him that I seemed to be getting a lot more online consulting work and his theory was that companies need boomer consultants more because more "civilian" boomers are finally hitting the web.  I always knew we would; the tribe that is the baby boom loves to be connected.  The web was a perfect home for us.  Just like THE FANTASTICKS.

*OK Feminist friends, there’s an element of sexism in this original fairy tale (they’ve rewritten the only really troubling song) but I have chosen to ignore it.  It just can’t trump the wonder and poetry.