My Formerly Hot Life (8 page)

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 pass 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, “Shit! 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, goddamn 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 Fucking 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 goddess 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 bitches 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 pissed off. Botox can relax those away if they really bother you. But there is no injectable to help the Formerly who argues with the maître 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 attitude.

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. Pass 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 assistants and associates 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 assistants 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 butt 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 badass.

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 Bump 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!

W
hen 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: