I Am Not An Old Recliner

I’ve been looking at YouTube clips of old celebrities. Doris Day, Dean Martin, George Gobel. Gale Storm…others even more obscure and largely forgotten by the two or three generations who might rightly know them; unknown to younger generations who know nothing about anyone older than they are.

Now, that’s an odd thing to me. I grew up knowing about old performers. I mean really old performers from silent movies and vaudeville. Why, I don’t know. I also knew something about speakeasies and log cabins and outhouses and the behavior of hobos. I knew about hair-bobbing in the 20s, what my grandmother cooked during the depression, how mother used leg makeup and eyebrow pencil to fake stockings during the war. (By the way, this required you be able to draw a straight line up the back of your leg to mimic the seams in stockings.)

I knew about farm horses and barnstorming pilots, organized crime in Kansas City, floods, fires, and the occasional tornado. My great-grandfather had almost cornered the cattle market in Kansas just as a drought hit and killed my chances to be a cattle baron’s princess.

My father went to the burlesque house in Kansas City every Monday night for years. (He swore he went for the comics, which is like reading Playboy for the articles.) As a result, I grew up with a rich appreciation for baggy-pants comic jokes. My parents met at the Pla-Mor Ballroom in Kansas City – the man who would become my godfather was the bouncer (and I have his lead-filled “zap”) so I grew up hearing about big bands and singers and backstage shenanigans. (Cab Calloway was a scamp, and Sally Rand wore a body suit.)

Sadly, it seems that –now – memory for the immediate past extends about two years – five at the most. And few seem to have learned any history at all. A younger woman I know at the gym was not sure which Kennedy was shot in 1968. A journalism graduate was asked to give the decade of WWII and she came up with the 60s.

Newscasts have no context, and precious little news. We have raised up a generation or two of people who don’t know the difference between reporting and PR. I look around and see ignorance on an appalling scale. I am shaking my fist at people who were apparently raised by wolves. They know nothing, and – even worse - don’t want to know anything. They embrace ignorance as a preferred way of being.

It is very difficult for me to stay away from the equivalent of, “Dagnabbit, you young whippersnappers, get off my lawn.”

I believe this is when you begin to die. If you hold on to your own era, and continue to look for the familiar, you will be increasingly irrelevant. There will be no need for anyone to talk to you, and you will be treated as a lumpy piece of furniture no one can quite bring themselves to throw out.

And so I am fighting back by embracing the clueless present and the uninformed future. I shall begin to twerk. There is a pole dancing studio that has open classes. I would pierce something but I am afraid of pain and infection – perhaps I will get a stick-on rhinestone for my nose. I am considering a barbed-wire tattoo.

Let no one say I am an old recliner.