My Formerly Hot Life (6 page)

As for me, let’s see … I’m wisely steering clear of fluorescent colors, jeans with zippers on the tapered legs, T-shirts with block capital letters shouting “RELAX!” and anything that has been made to look distressed with a grain thresher or doused with acid.

I’m not saying that I need to wear the same thing year after year with no variation (and no fun) and now that I’ve found my style I aim to be buried in it. I’m just thinking it through before I throw myself like a fashion slut at every trend that looks my way.

The whole vintage thing is a big mess now that I’m old enough to have actually lived through some of the eras being ironically re-referred to in fashion. Part of what makes vintage clothing so excellent is the contrast between the age of the outfit and the age of the person wearing it. A 20-year-old hipster boy wearing ’70s polyester or a 30-year-old going a little
Mad Men
is hot. A 42-year-old woman wearing a fringed suede vest, a paisley blouse and bell-bottoms? Cue the ballad of the sad clown. It’s time to put those clothes back in the Salvation Army clothing pool and let some
young chick discover the 1970s for the first time. She’ll think she invented it. It’ll be sweet.

Retro irony in general, Restraint says, should be left to those who didn’t actually eat Froot Loops as part of a balanced breakfast when Toucan Sam was still the Bruce Springsteen of cereal mascots. That means Formerlies such as myself are wise to avoid T-shirts with Sam, Mr. Bubble or Wonder Woman on them. Your own youth can be nostalgic, but only other people’s childhoods can be ironic. Oh, and I implore you to share this with any male Formerlies in your life. If he still has that Stones T-shirt from the
Tattoo You
tour and it miraculously still fits, he should feel free to wear it. But kindly discourage him from going to the Virgin Megastore and buying the reissue of the tee from a concert he once attended. That makes me want to cry. If his T-shirt looks 30 years younger than he is—because it is—there’s something tragic about the whole endeavor. He knows he was at the concert. It ought to be OK if no one else does unless it comes up naturally in conversation. It’s also OK to handcuff him to the radiator, if that’s what it takes to stop him from getting the shirt. Even if he doesn’t thank you for it, you’re still right.

I
didn’t want to get my daughters the American Girl dolls in the first place, mainly because they cost north of $100 apiece, and there was no predicting whether they’d wind up wedged between the bed and the wall like so many please-oh-please must-have toys before them. “No way. Not a chance,” I said. But even as the words left my lips I had a feeling I was going to cave.

Sure enough, as fast as you can say, “Accessories sold separately,” I did. I was no match for the instinctively manipulative campaign of cuteness my ladies launched. To save face (and money), I told them that (okay, okay!) if they could convince their grandparents to spring for them, I’d bestow my reluctant consent. The grandparents acquiesced, as grandparents are programmed to do.

In truth, by the time we were to place the online order, I was reluctantly grooving on the dolls, in particular the historical series. For those not familiar with the American Girl industrial complex, along with modern ones on skateboards
with little schoolbags, they have a line of dolls of various ethnicities from different eras in American history, for which you can get storybooks, costumes and other accoutrements. There was Felicity, the one Vivian wanted, a plucky, horse-loving rebel growing up in colonial Virginia; Addy, an escaped slave, and Josefina, a Mexican-American from the southwest of the 1820s. I noticed some dolls from the 20th century, too, such as Rebecca, a Russian-Jewish immigrant in 1914 New York, and Kit Kittredge, the spunky Depression-era reporter who Abigail Breslin played in the movie. Each came with a book about what it was like to be a little girl during her period in history. At least American Girl dolls are educational, I thought. Plus, they don’t have those poofed-up blow-job lips or wear hoochie outfits like the Bratz dolls my girls also crave.

I was talking with my friend Marisa about Felicity et al., and she mentioned that one of her daughters had the Julie Albright doll. I said I didn’t know about Julie; was she from the historical series?

“Oh, yes,” Marisa answered grimly. “She’s from 1974.”

Nineteen seventy-four?
1974???
Since when are the 1970s a historical era?

Sure, they were several decades ago, but
history
, as in, behind a glass case with a plaque on it at the Smithsonian, no way! The dolls are supposed to be girls of eight or nine. Guess who was around that age in 1974? Formerlies! Uh-huh. Marisa and I were seven in 1974. In the eyes of American Girl, and consequently millions of actual girls all over
the country, the children of the 1970s are veritable historical figures who could stand alongside Sacajawea or Elizabeth Cady Stanton on a textbook time line in a history book. “Nineteen twenty: Women won the right to vote. Nineteen forty-five: The United Nations Charter was signed. Nineteen seventy-four: Your mother was seven.”

I was appalled, but since Julie Albright had been doing macramé and staging love-ins in Marisa’s house for months already, her wound was not as fresh. She just sighed and let me rant. I looked Julie up on the American Girl website. She looks like she just stepped off the
Partridge Family
bus, with long, swishy, blond hair, sporting a white peasant blouse and bell-bottoms, with a braided, beaded leather belt and a crocheted cap. Marisa read the
Meet Julie
book that came with the doll to her daughters before bed the other night. “It talked about Billie Jean King and male chauvinist pigs. Her friend Ivy had a pocketbook made out of old blue jeans and she wore those Buffalo sandals I really wanted but my mom wouldn’t let me get! They mentioned mood rings and everything. Am I historical simply because I remember that stuff?”

I sure never thought so, but evidently we are. Did American Girl
really
need to point it out so starkly? They couldn’t have done a ’60s flower-child doll instead, thus ensuring that little girls could learn about smoking dope and war protesting without insinuating that their moms were “historical”? Thirty seconds with a calculator could have told the American Girl R&D team that women who were girls in the ’70s might have children of doll-buying age.

Of course, to a little kid, the 1970s may as well be feudal times. Sasha is always asking me things like, did they have taxis when I was a child, and did I have to make my own cheese, like Laura Ingalls in the Little House books I read to them? To my girls, for whom “the olden days” means any time before they were born, Julie’s world is as alien as Felicity’s.

Still, I’m the one with the credit card, not Sasha. I would not have had a problem with it if they had Julie in a line of dolls called When Mom Was Your Age or some such. When I hear Elton John singing “Bennie and the Jets” and realize that song came out when I was seven, I think,
Sheesh, that was a long time ago
. But it seems gratuitously callous to be relegated to the annals of history in a semi-official capacity by an outside entity while I’m not only still kicking, but kicking ass, thank you very much. Having a doll from one’s “historical” era feels like getting a lifetime achievement award, only—how can I say this clearly—I’M NOT THAT OLD!

Harumph.

These days, it often seems as if the main purpose of popular culture is to remind me of my age. But it wasn’t always so. When I was a kid, I listened to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” time and again, wailing into my hairbrush. I got a huge thrill out of the line “I’ll bet you think this song is about you, Don’t you, don’t you?” Simon was accusing the subject of the song of having a swelled head, while at that very moment, she was singing to HIM! Get it? The
song
was
about him! I felt so smart, so in on the joke. Cut me a break. I was seven. It was 1974. I’m told that’s ancient history.

That song, preceded by an abiding love for Ernie and Bert, was my introduction to the prolonged bear hug that is popular culture. I hugged back. I loved belonging to the community it created, and quickly found that listening to a person’s thoughts about the songs and ads and TV shows and movies that were lobbed at us with the speed and accuracy of a pitching machine provided a tidy shortcut into her head. What someone thought was cool, as well as whether she disavowed what she truly enjoyed in favor of what she was
supposed
to think was cool, told me a lot about how she saw herself. And thanks to the dizzying array of media (it seemed dizzying to me, even pre-cable and pre-Internet) I could chat with anyone, in the old-fashioned sense of the verb. Even on a torturous blind date in my 20s with the insurance industry lobbyist nephew of my stepfather’s college roommate, we shared a mutual bewilderment that Ace of Base was as popular as they apparently were. It didn’t a love match make, but the subject was our life raft until the check came.

Somewhere along the line, the bear released me from his hug. Now that I’m a Formerly, the song is most definitively NOT about me, a 42-year-old mom of two for whom it would be a bit pervy to cop to a favorite Jonas (Nick). I remember when I was but ten and even I knew that Lynyrd Skynyrd was a band, not a person. My mom, of
course, did not, and earned an exaggerated eye roll from yours truly. Today’s Formerlies tend to be more plugged in than our moms were, but as you read this, I am positive that somewhere a Formerly is asking her kid if Franz Ferdinand is that nice boy in school who wore the lederhosen on International Heritage Day. That will be me as soon as my girls start liking music that didn’t originate on the Disney Channel. (I’ll save you having to Google it: Franz Ferdinand is not an individual but a Scottish band about which those who are not yet Formerlies are all atwitter, no pun intended. I only know this because someone mentioned them and I had to fake recognition until I could go Google.)

The songs that
are
about me, or at one time were, are either being sung at hugely hyped reunion tours at stadiums across the nation, are being used in commercials for casino resorts, or to entice me to order the surf and turf for $9.99 at T.G.I. Friday’s. I get it now: Being a Formerly in pop cultural terms means that the sound track of your life is now playing on the lite rock stations, in the Sunday Night Oldies lineups or, if you’ve managed to keep an ear open to the semi-current, on the adult contemporary stations. You might hear a Muzak-ified version of songs you know while you’re waiting on hold with your cable provider, but you won’t hear it when you go into Forever 21 to get a gift card for your 19-year-old babysitter’s birthday. There, you will feel like an overstimulated old person. It will all seem too loud and discordant (even though some of the clothes are
cute) and you will probably consider walking out and just writing your babysitter a check.

My own musical tastes were arrested sometime in my 20s. My theory on this is that all through high school and college, you are basically one gigantic, living, breathing, studying, angsting, Dorito-eating adolescent raw nerve ending, hooking up and getting your heart broken and learning that you were breathtakingly wrong about all that you thought you knew. That jacked-up feeling of betrayal and urgency and intensity is matched by songs about the same issues that you hear on the radio. It feels as if Tracy Chapman or Alanis Morissette or Depeche Mode have crawled up your brain stem into your head and are shouting out everything you couldn’t possibly express because you’re not as talented as they are. They get it! They get you! That’s what makes it “your” music.

Fast-forward to now. When someone asks me how I’m doing, and I stop to think beyond the knee-jerk “Fine,” my answer is usually something like, “You know, good, thanks for asking.” If I think the person really wants to hear about my life, I might add that I’m busy or stressed or tired and offer a few unthrilling details as to why, but that everyone’s healthy and nothing is horribly wrong right this second, so overall, I’m giving today a thumbs-up. Aside from the occasional miracle of birth or unexpected crisis, life is on an even keel and my fondest wish on an average day is for an extra hour’s sleep and more time to spend with the people I love. If I find I’ve dropped a few pounds without trying or discover
a forgotten $20 in the pocket of the jeans I just pulled out of the dryer, it’s time to break out the margarita mix.

Now, imagine trying to set any of that to music; stability and contentment don’t make for great lyrics. Neither does compromise, a rendezvous with your mortgage broker about refinancing or a passive-aggressive phone conversation with your spouse about who will stop for baby wipes on the way home. I could see it as a country song, albeit not a very good one.

But you know what? I’d much rather turn on the radio and feel a wee bit left out than still be living the kind of life people write songs about, at least the songs that have to do with alienation and cheating and that deep-seated fucked-upness in a lover that can be mistaken for depth when you’re young and figuring it all out. Drama and upheaval are not constants in my life as they were when I was younger, and the relative stillness has let me revel in what I’ve built instead of constantly sweeping up after it’s been blown to bits.

“Our Lips Are Sealed” by the Go-Go’s is on my iPod, and I blasted it for my daughters in the car the other night. I squawked along with the lyrics, “Can you hear them, they talk about us, telling lies, well that’s no surprise.” The girls loved it and wanted to hear it 30 times in a row as they always do, which kind of killed it for me (“But Mommy, could you please not sing this time?”). On the 29th go-round, I realized that I no longer do anything titillating enough for “them,” whoever they are, to bother talking about, let alone lying about. I used to at least
think
I did. I see young women
on the street now who have an air of being the center of attention, which of course makes them the center of attention. They step off the curb expecting traffic to stop, and it does! If I stepped off the curb now, traffic would probably stop because no one likes a lawsuit, but not because the drivers and I are all in agreement that because I’m young and invincible I own the road. What’s more, I probably wouldn’t step off the curb and take the chance that the driver wasn’t too busy texting to notice me and step on the brake.