It's Never Too Late to Become a Champion Rower or (Insert Other Aspiration Here)

An Oldster Magazine link roundup...

Photo of the complete cast of the television program The Honeymooners. From left: Jackie Gleason (Ralph Kramden), Audrey Meadows (Alice Kramden), Art Carney (Ed Norton), Joyce Randolph (Trixie Norton). Via Wikimedia Commons

I tend to read, watch, and listen to an awful lot of Oldster-adjacent content. Every other Friday I’ll pass some of it along to you in a link roundup like this one.

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• This week we lost Joyce Randolph, the last remaining member of the cast of The Honeymooners, on which she starred as “Trixie Norton,” with Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, and Audrey Meadows. (Randolph is on the far right in the photo up top.)- Associated Press

• Also, RIP David Soul, best known as one half of Starsky & Hutch, who died last week at 80. - Associate Press via ABC News

  

  David Soul as Ken Hutchinson and Paul Michael Glaser as David Starsky from the premiere of the television series Starsky and Hutch. Via Wikimedia Commons

• “At 93, the Irishman is a four-time world champion in indoor rowing, with the aerobic engine of a healthy 30- or 40-year-old and the body-fat percentage of a whippet. He’s also the subject of a new case study, published last month in the Journal of Applied Physiology, that looked at his training, diet and physiology.” - in the Washington Post, Gretchen Reynolds reports on nonagenarian rowing champion Richard Morgan—who only started regularly exercising at 73. (Never too late, etc., etc…)

  author

  

  The Washington Post on Instagram: “For lessons on how to age well, we can turn to Richard Morgan. At 93, the Irishman is a four-time world champion in indoor rowing, with the aerobic engine of a healthy 30- or 40-year-old. He’s also the subject of a new case study. Researchers wondered, what did his late-life exercise do for his aging body? Tap the link in our bio to read the full story.”

  January 19, 2024

• “🔥…what you might not expect is that sex can get even hotter in your golden years…🔥” - a new study study on the sex lives of women over 60 just dropped, a collaboration between Cosmopolitan magazine and Kinsey Institute.

  

  Check out the study.

• “Funny how I trembled when I turned 40, more than a decade ago. How youthful 40 now seems.” - at Esquire, author Viet Thanh Nguyen writes “Inside My Midlife Crisis,” in a series called “Dispatches From the New Middle Age.”

• “I feel like I have to act like a kid to be on their level. I don’t know — I wish I could be more of an adult around them. But I don’t feel like one.” - friend and Oldster Magazine Questionnaire taker A.J. Daulerio—founder of The Small Bow, with which we partner on the “Ask a Sober Oldster” series—on sober parenting, in an interview with Kathryn Jezer-Morton for her “Brooding” column at The Cut/NYMag.

  

• “Rosalind Wiseman regularly receives emails from women who think they are going to surprise her with the following divulgence: ‘You are never going to believe this: My work is like middle school.’” - in the New York Times, Hannah Seligson talks with the author of Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence, which inspired Tina Fey’s cult classic 2004 film, Mean Girls, and the just-released musical version, about how middle school and high school apparently never end.

• Speaking of Mean Girls, if you’re in the mid-Hudson Valley come join me and journalist Jennifer Keishin Armstrong at Tinker Street Cinema in Woodstock at 7pm on Febuary 7th, where we’ll be talking about her great new book, So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It). We’ll also be screening and discussing key scenes from the 2004 original film, and touching on the “Mean Girls” chapter in my memoir-in-essay, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo.

  

  Order the book…

• “Here's Why You Might Have Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Thoughts At 3 a.m.” - at AARP’s The Girlfriend, Danielle Braff has some useful tips for those of us in the mid/late-life insomnia club.

• I went back to NYC for a couple of days this week to begin scheming the first edition of “Oldster Live,” something I hope to put together for spring or summer. While there, I got to pretend it was the 90s again and see my talented friend Ann Klein perform with her band at The Bitter End in the West Village. It reminded me of this piece from Oldster’s first year—an interview with Ann and fellow musician,

  Mary Lee Kortes
  , in which they talk about and perform “Not Done Yet,” a sort of Oldster theme song they co-wrote.

  Not Done Yet

• Okay, one more from the archive before I go, this one from

  Kathleen Canrinus
  around this time last year:

  Passing Down My Sierra Legacy

That’s it for now. Have a great weekend. See you next week with another slate of great essays, interviews, and more…

Thanks for being here, and for your support. I couldn’t do this without you.

-Sari