Elderism #20

Bill McLaughlin and Dick Hughes are two 85 year-old gentlemen who have self-published a guide to museums in and near Philadelphia. The guide–a stapled and Xeroxed packet–offers reviews of 203 venues. Studio 360 did a sweet segment on the two men this weekend, meeting up with them at a Frida Kahlo exhibition. “There’s a lady lying in bed and all her inside parts are blown out of her mouth,” Bill describes one Kahlo painting. He adds,

“That is repulsive, but good.”

Elderism #19

Over on the website Margaret and Helen, which claims to be written by a politics-obsessed 82 year-old named Helen Philpot and her best friend since college, the fiery Helen has been training her eye on the election and on The View:

So I love my Whoopi Goldberg. And that Joy Behar makes me laugh. But, now there is that other one…I don’t remember her name…Yesterday she announced that she was still undecided. OK, that’s it. She’s a jackass. I mean this woman is on a show called The View. What exactly is it that she can’t see? She has met, in person, all the big players in this little card game. Talk about being spoon fed. And as a fellow plus-size gal I know that she has had more than her share from that spoon.

The interface between politics and television brings out all of Helen’s passions. After one of the presidential debates, she offered,

Well, I thought it was a good debate. My hats off to Bob Shieffer…and my blouse too if he plays his cards right.

Is this Helen for real? To me, the wonderfully ad-hominem and petty quality of some of her posts does not say “scooter-riding octogenarian,” but, rather, “homosexual shut-in.”

There are lots of idiots out there who aren’t running for office, but don’t get me started on that shit for brains Elisabeth from The View.

Elderism #18

I wish I knew how to say “nutjob” in Italian; I imagine it’s something like noccelavoro.

My current favorite noccelavoro is Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The 72 year-old center-right pol’s most sustained act of noccelavoro-ism is to have implanted in Italy’s parliament and government a number of TV starlets made famous by his television empire. (Berlusconi was indicted for this casting-couch behavior in January–the 17th of the 17 criminal trials he’s gone through without being convicted.)

Alexander Stille writes in this week’s New Yorker that, during his election campaign this spring, Berlusconi openly bragged about how much better-looking his party’s female candidates for parliament were than his opponent’s. The prime minister also claims that pregnant women ask him to lay his hands on their belly, and bald women, their head. (Apparently he’s not just “touched,” he also has “the touch.”)

When the current financial crisis hit Europe, Stille writes, Berlusconi urged his constituents to keep buying stock and keep spending. “To set an example, he headed off to a disco, telling the crowd there,

‘If I sleep for three hours, I still have enough energy to make love for another three.'”

You Go, Frau Blucher!

In all of American cinema, is there a more emotionally-devestating shot than the one in The Last Picture Show of Cloris Leachman–it’s taken from high above, so as to make a banquet of her humility–sitting on her bed, having been stood up by her much younger lover? I can’t think of one.

So it was doubly thrilling to hear that, career-wise, Leachman has been having the last laugh recently. According to Page Six, Mel Brooks told Leachman last year that, at 81, she was too old to play Frau Blucher–the role she’d created in Brooks’s film, Young Frankenstein–in the Broadway adaptation. (Brooks told Variety, “We’re afraid the show…could kill [her]…We don’t want her to die onstage.”)

But on Monday the Broadway gossip site billymasters.com reported that, now that Leachman has been wowing the country with her moves on the reality dance show, Dancing with the Stars, Brooks has reached out to her again about incarnating Blucher.

Will Cloris entertain the notion? According to Page Six, she’s letting Mel sweat.

Elderism #17

A fairly dark-hued and egotistical portrait of Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schultz has emerged over the years. I remember reading Jonathan Franzen’s essay in The Discomfort Zone, wherein I learned that Schultz’s resentment at the name Peanuts, which editors had given his comic strip in 1950, was still vibrant at the end of Schultz’s life. (Schultz told an interviewer in 1987, 13 years before he would succumb to colon cancer in his seventies: “To label something that was going to be a life’s work with a name like Peanuts was really insulting.” When the interviewer suggested that 37 years might have softened the blow, Schultz replied, “No, no. I hold a grudge, boy.”)

So it was heartening to read in a recent The Sunday Times review of the new Schultz biography by David Michaelis that Schultz  did have a little self-effacement: he had a regret.

“His one regret, he said, was that he never once let Charlie Brown kick the football held out for him by Lucy: always she snatched it away and always he landed on his back.”

Elderism #16

Foul-mouthed cult figure Kenny Shopsin–he’s the eccentric, sixtysomething New York City chef and restaurant owner who Calvin Trillin wrote about in the New Yorker, and whose menu has 900 items on it, some of them bizarro–has been getting a lot of love for his new cookbook, Eat Me. Typical of Shopsin’s, uh, charm, is his avowal in Eat Me that, yes, pancakes are tasty, but,

“They are flour and milk drowned in butter and some form of sugar. They’re crap.”

Also, Shopsin–who has been known to scream at his customers, and who will not accept parties of four or more–maintains that the customer is always wrong

“until they show me they are worth cultivating [as customers].”

But, as it turns out, he’s not all prickle. The United States of Arugula author David Kamp writes that Eat Me‘s epilogue “reveals a depth and humanity to Kenny Shopsin that belies the fat-crank caricature.” To wit,

“I know it goes against our capitalist system,” Shopsin writes, “but I have never been interested in the normal symptoms of success, such as higher profit margins and expansion of income. I have never had a goal to make money so that I could retire or so that I could hire a low-wage employee to do the cooking for me…Running a restaurant for me is about running a restaurant. It is not a means to get someplace else. I wake up every morning, and I work for a living like a farmer. Running a restaurant is a condition of life for me. And I like everything about this life.”

Elderism #15

Three years ago, Florence Henderson–that’s “Mrs. Brady” to you and me–caused a bit of a kerfuffle when she remarked that Christopher Knight, who’d played one of her TV sons back in the day, should not marry model Arianne Curry (which he went ahead and did anyway).  So it was sort of hilarious to read the 74 year-old Henderson, when asked in an interview on AOL today whether she and Knight were still on speaking terms, say,

“I haven’t been in touch with him, but I’m not in touch with Chris all the time anyway. Chris and I are connected; we will always love each other. We have no animosity toward each other, and I have no animosity toward…oh, god, I can’t think of her name…Adrianne!”

Elderism #14

If the number 8, being, as it is, an upright infinity sign, augurs good luck, then shouldn’t 88 be very fortunate indeed? Don’t tell that to 88 year-old novelist Doris Lessing–her recent “A Life in the Day” column for the Times of London was a grumblefest. Of winning last year’s Nobel prize for literature:

“The fact is that ever since I won the Nobel, all I do is talk–whether I

know anything about the subject or not…I’m bored stiff with myself.”

Elderisms #12 and 13

In today’s Times, Penelope Green writes about how the 80 year-old Scottish decorator Keith Fowler, who worked for Jacqueline Onassis and Pat Buckley, is auctioning off some of his furniture. Fowler–who says of one piece he’s reluctant to part with, “I could just eat that chair”–says of a less–loved item of Edwardian vintage,

“It’s not my period, but it adds a bit of sauce.”

Meanwhile, in Peter Terzian’s Bookforum review of sixtysomething Julian Barnes’s meditation on mortality, “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” the godless Barnes writes that he misses the “beautiful lie” of Christianity, especially when he looks at religious art:

“It would–to put it mildly–add a bit of extra oomph, wouldn’t it?”

“Sauce,” “a bit of oomph”: currently on my shopping list.

Elderism #11

“After a long battle with diabetes and obscurity,” the comedian and blaxploitation icon Rudy Ray Moore, according to his booking agent’s website, Shocking Images, “passed peacefully on Sunday at the age of 81.” Thought to be the third most sampled man in the world–Dr. Dre, Big Daddy Kane, and 2 Live Crew, among others, all used snippets of his work in their music–Moore not altogether modestly called himself “the Godfather of Rap” (he also took credit for getting Richard Pryor to abandon “the N word.”)

Not much of Moore’s  work reached mainstream audiences wholly intact, though, largely due to the prurient zest of his often-rhyming material. Interestingly, in his personal life, Moore was quite religious–according to his LA Times obit, he took great pride in taking his mother to the National Baptist Convention each year, and often spoke in church. How did he reconcile his pottymouth with his piousness? He explained to the Miami Herald in 1997, “I wasn’t saying dirty words just to say them. It was a form of art, sketches in which I developed ghetto characters who cursed.

I don’t want to be referred to as a dirty old man, rather a ghetto expressionist.”