Hi, Boomers,
Frustration mounts. I’m trying to build a website for my book, Sixty, Sex & Tango-Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer – on IWeb on my Mac and I literally want to throw my beloved Mac against my wall. On what planet does IWeb help think I live on? It takes me twenty minutes of staring at the instructions about setting up a hyperlink and I still don’t get it. Just by accident, however, I solved that problem and now I hate the homepage. I’m hopeless. Some lovely creature at the UCLA bookstore helped me yesterday, and no, I didn’t bat my eyes and get all girly with him, but he was simply interested in the technical aspect of building a website from IWeb, and he played with it for half an hour and got me started. Then I got home and the information vanished as quickly as it came into my pee brain. Hopeless. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is my website. Unfortunately, it’s only 4:00 o’clock and I am eagerly awaiting 5 o’clock because that’s cocktail hour. However, one can argue, and I have many a time that it is 5 o’clock somewhere in the world. But I will refrain because I’m on a tear about age at the moment. My parting words to my tech genius before making an appointment with him on Monday at 3 o’clock was, “I wish I had been born in the computer age so I would have the vocabulary to go forth and do the damn website myself.” He laughed at the old lady stomping off.
While I am on the subject of age, I was recently invited to be a member of the Jewish Women’s Theater in LA. Through a friend of a friend kind of thing, I ended up meeting eight other women this morning for brunch this morning at a home in the hills over looking the Pacific Ocean. It’s one of the most spectacular days in southern California in a long time. I had a splendid several hours plotting and planning the next year’s work with the theater. The age skewed to fifty-five and older – me being the oldest, of course, and I’m tired of that status, by the way. After a little champagne and some organic orange juice (what else in SoCal), I was listening attentively to all the women make contributions to organizing and planning a fund raiser, programs, salon readings, developing a literary arm for new material and all the while I kept thinking how lucky I was to be in the company of some of the most intelligent women I have ever met – all over 55 years of age.
The group revitalized my dormant theatrical bent. It’s been dormant for a very long time, since the day I left the Old Globe theater in 1984 and trekked to Los Angeles to become a producer and writer. I was off “the boards” for good – until this moment at 66 and I became interested in a group with a mission to tell stories of Jewish women in the modern world. The Jewish Women’s Theater is a virtual theater – changing venues from salons to temples to art galleries, and the organizers are laying the groundwork for a very interesting mission. These women are writers, rabbis, producers, filmmakers, lawyers, accountants, commercial producers, with so much talent and energy they could possibly defy gravity. They’ve been doing this work for two years and that’s not a long time in the theater world. I ran a full time legitimate equity theater for 5 years and I can confirm that the road to finding an audience is rocky and long. But these women have tenacity and commitment and the group reminded me of decades ago when I forged my theater with my partner and my associate and we did it and we succeeded and we completed our mission before moving on in our lives. I can feel the excitement building and I can feel the youthful vigor I once had begin to percolate as I tap into things I want to do with the group.
It’s amazing the emotions and feelings that are reawakened in my 60’s. I feel this excitement offers an array of possibilities that I hadn’t even thought about. It feels like Berkeley in the 60’s again when everything was possible and the future was bright.
So age is only a number, they say. The Buddhists say that you are only as old as the health of your spine. And I say that passion and commitment and involvement is the key to staying vital and young.
Is it 5 o’clock yet?
Namaste
Joan