Where are my keys? Good question.
I started losing track of them five years ago and gave up because I’d rather use my remaining brain cells to scour my memory for movie titles, obscure sitcom actors and names of the spouses of old friends. I’ll catch myself punching the air with a triumphant “Yes!” when my brain has successfully located this mostly useless information. When recalling the theme song from Laverne & Shirley is a cause for celebration, your keys are really the least of your problems, but I don’t tell my son that. I just repeat what has become my catchphrase, “I’m doing the best I can,” and continue rooting around the kitchen.
“And this concert better be great, Mom.”
“Oh, it will be. I guarantee it,” I reply as we exit the house aided by a spare set of keys.
I have promised him something extraordinary so I can spend two hours in his company. If all goes as planned, he will realize that I am a great mother, or at least that everything I do, have done, and will do in the future comes from having his best interests at heart. I hope I can deliver.
I blame this entire enterprise on biology.
My friends with older kids love to regale me with tales of how things will turn around.
“Your kid will eventually realize your worth and you’ll find yourself having a ball with him,” they assure me. But most of them had kids when they were younger than I was. I had to do theater in Off-Off-Nowhere-Near-Broadway theaters in my twenties, instead of having children like nature intended, and now I’m paying the unexpected price of going through menopause while my son is going through puberty.
So many aspects of my grandmother Frances’s life were thoroughly unsatisfactory. Higher education was a privilege reserved for the boys in the family. Her choice of spouse was largely dictated by the onset of the Depression. On top of that, in order to work, she had to claim to be unmarried, as no employers wanted to hire women who might be about to get preggers. At least at fifty, she was rewarded with the pleasure of inhaling the milky, sweet smell emanating from the heads of her grandchildren. It makes sense that just as your estrogen flow is waning, you get a boost of oxytocin, often referred to as the “love hormone,” from caring for your grandchildren. My mother, at fifty-three, was a first-time grandma when my sister gave birth to the first of her sons.*
I don’t have the luxury of waiting for my son to grow up and say, Now I get it, Mom. I had him at thirty-seven. If my kid follows my lead, I’m going to have little ambulatory time to enjoy his appreciation. Tonight, damn it, he will see I am just a little bit cool, even if he hates me for it.*
The idea that a concert could bring us together seems perfect. We regularly listen to music on our computers and the iPods scattered around our house. Or so I thought, until I saw his list of favorite bands on his Facebook page: The Antlers, Deerhoof and Deerhunter. I had never heard of any of them. What is it with all the venison-themed bands? Clearly the window was closing.
“What exactly is this we’re going to, Mom? Do you even know?”
“I’m not sure,” I lie.
Oh, I know, I do. I have planned this outing for two weeks now, but I must withhold details, because the more he knows, the easier it will be for him to reject the experience. My friend Heidi’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Eloise, produces a local live music series, which has gained a national following on the Web. We’ll be part of a small group who has been invited to a taping.
The idea that my mother and I would have shared musical tastes when I was a teenager would have been laughable. During my childhood there was one record player in our household. I told this to my son when he was ten years old. He asked if I had taken a flight to New York when I left home for college or if airplanes hadn’t been invented yet.*
Though we were secular Jews, the few records my parents had invested in on their limited budget were Jewish-themed. We listened to You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, My Son, the Folk Singer, and Theodore Bikel’s Greatest Broadway Hits, over and over. If I lose my short-term memory, a definite possibility considering both a grandfather and an aunt had Alzheimer’s disease, I might just be left with Allan Sherman routines and Bikel singing “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music.
When my sister turned fifteen, the record player migrated into her bedroom, and it wasn’t until she left home for college that I inherited her music collection and my parents bought me an 8-track deck to boot. But we never listened to Steely Dan, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Elton John together in the way that iPods and iTunes have made music so portable. When I was sixteen, I saw Jethro Tull play at the Hollywood, Florida, Sportatorium with a group of girlfriends. It was the first rock concert I attended, and maybe it was the strobe lighting and smoke effects, seeing the only rock band led by a flutist, or that someone puked on my tan suede Kork-Ease, but it was unforgettable. This will be my son’s first concert. And he is going with . . . me . . . his mother. If there is any generational marker of difference, this surely must be it.
Our destination turns out to be a cramped loft in Hollywood. It’s hot and the place is packed with teenagers sprawled on sectional couches in front of a small stage where the indie punk band Titus Andronicus is warming up. We find two empty folding chairs on a riser one level up from the couches, where other parental-looking people are seated, as the two Web VJ hosts take their place in front of the stage. My son inches his chair away from mine and stares straight ahead, careful not to look in my direction. He’s younger than these teenagers, but I sense he wants to blend in with them, so it is not without trepidation that I whisper, “Take off your baseball cap.” I want the girls to see his beautiful face, but he won’t do it, and I know I can’t push him. After half an hour, when he finally relents and takes off the cap, I gesture to him with a triumphant raise of an eyebrow, but he lets me know that his decision had nothing to do with my suggestion, mouthing a silent What?—the staple of the teenage male vocabulary.
As the hosts move into place, I can tell they are not fifteen years old, but hired guns that appear to be in their early twenties.
The male host, an actor dude, is dressed in such a casual way, you know a tremendous amount of effort went into his appearance. It’s hard to say which aspect of his façade is more studied, his offhand delivery or his attempt to grow a beard. Each delicate hair on his chin appears strategically placed to cover as much surface as possible.
The female host has features almost horsey enough to render her unattractive, but her hair is shiny and flowing and she’s got a flattering leg-to-torso ratio. She’s also wearing a silky halter top, held up, as if defying gravity, by tiny sparkling strands of silver. I hate her instinctively. I’m positive she was a cheerleader in high school and that I scored better than her on my SATs, at least the English part. She reminds me of the blondes in bikinis who bite into burgers, juice dripping down their chins, in Carl’s Jr. commercials. She’s cultivated a ditzy delivery and even gets the name of the band wrong—“Titus Andonicus!”—but no one corrects her. Is it because her complexion is flawless and dewy? I know I shouldn’t be so judgmental, but one of the few things I’ve been successful at maintaining into middle age is long-held resentments. Diets, meditation practice and regular flossing were all passing flirtations, but my distrust of perkiness? Intact as the day I first noticed the difference between my doleful Semitic features and cute-as-a-button symmetrical faces.
My pal Heidi, who’s seated near me, leans over and says, “That was you, right?” referencing my career as a television host. But I was never that girl. Tan, fit, appealing in a nonthreatening way. I’ve always rebelled against convention. In the eighties, I had dreadlocks. My hair was my anarchistic comment on our materialistic society, or I couldn’t afford conditioner—maybe both.
Cheerleader Host turns the discussion over to the teens on the couch.
The first to speak is Maize, a girl with vintage thrift-shop style. She fronts her own band and expertly drops names of her fav
orite groups. After her, scholarly Cassiopeia lets us know she’s aware that the group’s name has been lifted from a Shakespearean play and asks about the role of metaphor in song construction. There’s tomboy Dale, with her gender-neutral name, buzz cut and leather wrist cuffs, and my friend’s daughter, Eloise. Eloise is simply attired in jeans and T-shirt, glasses and long straight hair. She has an understated authority. She thanks the band for coming and asks questions about their musical influences. I can only intuit that Eloise has watched her fair share of television and determined that Cheer Host could potentially broaden the series’ audience to include Web-surfing males who enjoy burger commercials.
The band starts to play and I’m convinced Cheer Host doesn’t even like music. She’s bopping perfunctorily, but I am mesmerized by her confidence. I gasp, realizing she’s so attractive she might even go home with one of the band members.
The band is bursting with youthful energy. The only female member, Amy, a guitarist and violinist, comes alive when the band starts playing. Warming up, she had appeared doughy, but now she’s jumping up and down and her joy is palpable and contagious. She’s also wearing a bright red romper. The romper is an infantilizing one-piece short jumpsuit, something like an adult onesie. Once reserved for toddlers, rompers were a questionable fashion trend in the seventies that has been newly embraced by vintage-wearing twenty-somethings in Brooklyn.* Does Amy wear that for every show? Or does she have rompers in different colors, I wonder, knowing that my romper years are long gone and I will never ever be seen in one, unless portraying the mentally ill.
The lead singer, Patrick, is emaciated, with a rangy beard and mischievous eyes. He radiates an intensity just menacing enough to suggest he could easily be cast in the TV movie Charles Manson: The Early Years.
Do they have medical insurance? Has their van had its tires regularly rotated? How often, if at all, do they shower on the road? Will they continue as professional musicians or will this be a story they tell their kids one day about when they were in a band and toured the country before selling real estate or opening a Guitar Center franchise in some suburban sprawl? Have they eaten today? Patrick looks really hungry. I imagine inviting him home, spooning soup into his mouth and packing him nutritious snacks for the road.
In yet another unmistakable mark of aging, I notice how damn loud it is. But not a single other parent is making a stink about it. Is it possible that they have each come with the same intention as me? I resolve not to be a killjoy and concentrate instead on struggling to understand the lyrics—yet another challenge that marks me as an oldster.
I’m annoyed. Patrick said this album (he said “album”!) weaves together a tapestry of historical artifacts, including Civil War battle cries and Bruce Springsteen, with current events. Wow, Patrick not only has ambitious musical goals, but he just referred to someone I regularly listen to as an artifact. I’m both incensed and intrigued. But it’s futile. Can’t. Understand. A. Word. Eloise and the teens in the audience know all the lyrics and are singing along.
As I watch them, I’m so glad that the ability to appreciate new music is a sign of neuroplasticity, because I am genuinely liking the band’s sound. I’m not going down without a fight! In fact, I like it so much, though the lyrics remain beyond reach, I want to dance, so I stand up and start to move forward toward the stage, when an arm reaches out and stops me. “Don’t move down front,” says one of the dads I’m seated with. “They don’t want us to be on camera.” Like lepers, we must be quarantined. For the first time in my life the sobering realization sinks in that should my person ever be violated, no one would suggest it was because I had worn something provocative. No, it would be characterized as a hate crime against women.*
Patrick addresses the crowd. He speaks of the horror of war, which he learned about firsthand by viewing YouTube videos posted by musicians singing about war experiences they’ve read about on blogs written by poets in Red Hook. He tells the crowd he hopes that one of them will be able to change the world. He’s not addressing me or the other parents. Why would he? I’m just someone’s mom, whom they might register only if I was standing over them and my hair were on fire. And then probably only to text “PLOSWHOF” (parent looking over shoulder with hair on fire) “LOL.”
I was a C-minus science student, but I think this is what Einstein meant when he theorized the existence of parallel universes. Age has spun me into an alternate universe, one that exists in exactly the same space-time, but is unseen by those who are younger. My writing will not be read by them, unless endorsed by someone their age and then viewed as a kitschy relic of the past. I will not be noticed by them unless I am in the company of someone younger. I am invisible. I can only hope to remain visible to people close to my own age and older, while young people are visible to all, as if illuminated by klieg lights.
Except for Betty White. Betty White is visible to younger people. If the successful campaign to have Betty White host SNL was any indication, people enjoy having an old person around. When I was growing up in the seventies, Ruth Gordon was the designated old broad in films. She also once hosted SNL. Before that, there was Molly Picon. But there is a limit to how many old people young people want to have around. The campaign to have Carol Burnett host SNL never gained traction. Just one. One old person is enough.
As a teenager, I enjoyed afternoon schnapps with my octogenarian singing teacher. In my twenties and thirties I always had a cherished friendship with a teacher, family friend or older colleague at whose home I might celebrate holidays or meet up with them for an elaborate lunch—their treat, of course.
You don’t want too many oldsters, that would seem too Harold and Maude–ish, like you had a fetish for the elderly. I remind myself to make a date with my current old person, Rachel, a widowed neighbor in her nineties. Maybe someday I could be someone’s old person. But as I succeed in making out Patrick singing the lyric “Tramps like us, baby, we were born to rally ’round the flag,” I realize I already am someone’s old person. I’ve assumed the college students I occasionally hire to work as my assistants think of me as their more experienced peer, but no, surely they’ve noticed the many years between us. I am their old person. Of course, if my kid becomes famous or extremely successful in whatever field he goes into, I might receive a career boost or at least get a lot of dinner invitations basking in his reflected glow. I make a mental note to push him harder in school.*
Amy steps up to the microphone. She adjusts her romper and begins to speak.
“When I was fifteen I thought the most important things were to lose ten pounds and what people thought of me. It took me twelve years to figure out that it was to follow my dreams and not to care what anyone thinks and stand by my friends.”
I want to cheer for Amy because I’m still working on my self-esteem, but when I look to see what the couch girls will think of Amy’s empowered statement, I see them nodding their heads casually in agreement. I have the feeling I’ve got a front-row seat to some kind of Darwinian adaptation taking place. Oh, brave new world that hath such confident young women in’t.
I’ve no doubt misjudged Cheer Host as well. She’s probably a rocket scientist, or at least much smarter than I am. I once had a similar job, hosting a music video program for VH1. I refused to refer to the artists by their first names; instead, I insisted on calling them Ms. Houston, and Ms. Carey. “Annabelle,” the producer gently prodded me, “the viewers want to feel like they know these artists personally.”
“But they don’t,” I declared with the defiance that being in your twenties, attending only two years of college, and dropping out can give you, “and I want to remind them of that.” I held that job exactly one day.
Cheer Host sees how to work the game, and that’s a useful skill. I also never made one of those highly lucrative beer commercials, though I auditioned for them numerous times. No, I appeared in ads for Zima alcoholic beverages, whose flavoring resembled a cross betwe
en Kool-Aid and motor oil. During the time those spots ran on television, people would yell at me as I walked on the street, “Hey, Zima girl, that stuff tastes like shit, I want my money back!” I’m sure my son thought Cheer Host was hot, but even I knew better than to ask him.
The band starts to pack up their gear and the teenagers stand and casually begin to file out. I find it thrilling to be up close and personal with professional musicians, but this is the Internet generation, who take personal contact with the celebrated so much in stride that they have compressed the space between themselves and the band. This may explain why it is so hard to get them to fork over money for music; it’s that old adage about familiarity breeding contempt playing out in its digital incarnation.
As we depart I ask, “Did you like it?!” but I have made the mistake of expressing too much excitement and am met with stony silence for the ride home.
In the car, I make one last attempt to bridge the gap between us. Cats. Not Cats the musical, but cats the domestic pets. Cats are his single enduring memory of New Orleans, and that’s really the tip of the iceberg of how much we love the species. It’s embarrassing to admit, but we were suckered into watching the cat being cradled by a gorilla on YouTube, the cat chasing a squirrel through backyard tubing and the kitten having a nightmare.* Left to our own devices, we could watch all fifty-eight million cat videos consecutively. So I say, “You know, Meow, the thirty-nine-pound cat who was on a diet, died today.”
My son replies in a witheringly dry deadpan I only dreamed of achieving as a comedian, “And how is that newsworthy?” I have to admit, I’m rather pleased that the critical-thinking curriculum at the overcrowded public school I send him to seems to be sinking in. I have to give it to him. He slinks inside, heads up to his room and slams the door.
Titus Andronicus, what was I thinking? I studied the play in college. It’s the “punk” Shakespearean drama in which the queen of the Goths eats her sons in a pie. I’ve taken my only child to see a band named after this most tragic tale of motherhood. If he ever makes the connection, it could be the subject of a therapy session, if not another entry in the ledger I expect he’s keeping dedicated to the many ways I am failing at parenting.
I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 Page 4