A Link-Filled Postcard From The Road
Wish you were here. This roundup of Oldsterish content is your souvenir...
I tend to read, watch, and listen to an awful lot of Oldsterish content. Now and then I’ll pass some of it along to you in a link roundup like this one. This edition is sent to you from New Orleans, Louisiana, where I’m tagging along on my husband’s business trip.
When Russian soldiers intruded upon an older Ukrainian couple’s home, the couple promptly told them to get lost, and showed them the way out. Via CNN.
Want to support the people under siege in Ukraine? Veteran Lower East Side Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello has lots of useful links and information on their website.
This has not one thing to do with age and aging, but let’s all sign this petition to get the U.S. Government working harder to free WNBA star Brittney Griner, who has been detained for over a month in Russia. Via Black Feminist Future.
Lilith Magazine’s “The New 40” project amplifies the voices of women and women-identifying emerging writers ranging in age from 43 to 87. Esther D. Kustanowitz reports at EJewishPhilanthropy.
“It’s been more than 20 years since I graduated high school, yet the repression of LGBTQ+ youth in Florida remains much the same.” For Time Magazine, novelist Kristen Arnett recalls being a Florida teen who suffered for not feeling safe in coming out, and laments the state’s proposed “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
I’ve had a crush on Dick Van Dyke since I was 3 and saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, in which he starred as quirky inventor Caractacus Potts. I could have had a shot—turns out the 96-year-old is married to 50-year-old singer Arlene Silver (six years younger than me!). These days, he’s still performing. In this video, he sings and dances with his wife—and his barbershop quartet, Dick Van Dyke and The Vantastix. Via Open Culture.
76-year-old Henry Winkler is having a moment, co-starring in the wonderful Barry, which will return to HBO for season three on April 30th, and now also playing an Orthodox Jewish dad in Chanshi, a risqué Israeli comedy series, per Lior Zaltzman at Kveller.
“From chic Sylvie in Emily in Paris, to Sam in Better Things, unapologetic and flawed midlife women are ruling the small screen.” So says Jennifer Keishin Armstrong in an article for the BBC, in which she argues we need more of them. I couldn’t agree more.
If you’re in New York, there are a few days left to catch Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless at La Mama, “a comedic and revelatory music and dance/theater celebration of older women and the thrill of unlikely art” from OBIE and Drama Desk Award winning playwright and composer, Ellen Maddow.
“Harriet didn’t intend to die at all, and yet she did so in a way that perfectly reflected her spirit and charisma.” At The New Yorker, geriatrician and palliative-care physician Dr. Rachael Bedard writes about what she learned from her grandmother’s death.
“New York is only a small part of the world. Being 40 ain’t so bad in the rest of the world. Nobody on the Adriatic in Yugoslavia will see your hairline crows’-feet wrinkles.” The eldest of the oldsters tend to grumble when I feature younger generations. But as I’m reminded by this previously unpublished essay from late actress, author, and East Village Eye columnist Cookie Mueller, when you’re in your 20s and 30s, 40 seems old. At Interview Magazine.
Sweet! Enjoy your road trip.
Well, Cookie Mueller was right when she thought 40 was old. It was the oldest she ever got.