Is Houston Ready for an "Old" Mayor?

Yeah, we know: the question de jour is supposed to be, “Is Houston ready for a gay mayor?” and at some point soon we’re going to take another of our interminable strolls down “Memory Lane” (hopefully accompanied by an able-bodied youngster to keep Gramps upright) to contrast the current climate with those not-so-long-past days of the “Straight Slate” and Louie Welch’s inadvertently broadcast suggestion that we “shoot the queers” to stop AIDS. But first let’s examine a really sensitive issue, one that we assume will not find its way into the public discourse--that of age, specifically the age of mayoral contender Peter Brown, who, if his Wikipedia entry is to be believed (yeah, a Houston city councilman’s got a Wikipedia entry--all hierarchies are being overturned, mon frere!), was born on Oct. 16, 1936. That would make Brown 73 when voters go to the polls in November and, should he win and then successfully pursue his term-limited allotment of years at City Hall, pushing 80 (!) when he’s finally wheeled out of City Hall in January 2016.

We got to thinking about the age issue (or, if you will, non-issue) after viewing Brown’s debut television advertisement, the first of the mayoral race, which according to no less an unbiased authority than the Petter Brown campaign has gotten rave reviews from the media and the kids in the blogosphere (which will translate into about, um, zero votes). With its quick cuts and frenetic pacing, the commercial is obviously keyed to making the 72-year-old grandfather of 15--here’s a dude who’s damn sure fulfilled his biological destiny!--appear to be vital, a veritable whirlwind of obsessive-compulsive perpetual motion* who just can’t stop serving the public, 24/7, a forceful PHYSICAL presence ready and able to impose his “blueprint” for Houston smack dab on the city (as if the city were a Lovett Home or sumpin’), then drop down and give us 20 push-ups, military-style, to burn off any excess energy.

Ageism--is that what you call it?--is of course the last acceptable prejudice that one can voice aloud in polite circles without fear of opprobrium: consider the tiresome razzing that John McCain still gets from late-night comedians over his long earthly tenure (we saw Steven Colbert do it just recently, aided and abetted by McCain himself, who tries to defuse the issue with frequent displays of good humor, when he’s not being a crotchety old man). Now consider this: Peter Brown is but six weeks younger than John McCain! When Brown entered this world, FDR was seeking his second term as president and Oscar “The Old Gray Fox” Holcombe was only midway into his eventual 22 years as mayor of Houston, neither as “old” nor quite as “gray” as he would be when serving out his string in the late ‘50s (by our possibly faulty calculations, Holcombe was in his late 60s when he stopped being mayor, and Bob Lanier--who already screamed “elderly” when he was first inaugurated--was just a little older than Brown is now when he was term-limited to the political scrap heap). Perhaps more astonishing, one of our favorite early Hollywood film stars, “Petey”, the crazy-eyed pooch from the Little Rascals, was still extant when Brown was born, and in fact was to pose for a picture with our then-10-year-old mother-in-law at Atlantic City’s famed Steel Pier the very next year, when Brown presumably was in his swaddlin’ clothes. Damn, that was long ago.

UPCOMING: We already know Houston’s ready for a black mayor, Lee P. Brown having crossed that bridge more than 10 years ago, but is Houston ready for a gay black mayor? An old gay black mayor? We’ll ask the experts!

*We can empathize: Although we’re not a member of Brown’s age cohort (we’re of the generation that didn’t go to Vietnam, didn’t go to Woodstock), we have recent first-hand experience of that sobering phenomenon of which Springsteen has sung--that is, of the girls in their summer clothes passing us by, sometimes passing us by even in their winter clothes, unaware that only the previous month we had had one of those whatyamacallits, an erection.

Side Benefits

After far too long we caught up last week with our old pal Belacqua, with whom we’ve been friends since 5th grade, or thereabouts, and who many years ago was a part-time running podnuh of ours, back when we both had hair and a reasonable amount of youthful vitality. He’s also, as you may not know, one of Our Town’s most astute commentators on culture and commerce, especially after a beer or two. As he and I and the wives gorged ourselves at that venerable Indian restaurant in Rice Village, we spoke of many things: the artistry of The Wire, the pomposity (perhaps justified) of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the late-life pleasures of puttering in our respective suburban yards (just like our dads did!) and in general of the narrowing horizon as we maneuver through middle of our sixth decade of life on earth.

Belacqua reported that the Houston-born-and-reared IT corporation for which he’s happily toiled for a decade now has more employees in India than it does here in the county seat of Harris, and that many of his remaining colleagues in the locality also hail from the Subcontinent. The outsourcing has allowed the company, which sold its headquarters and now rents back space from the new owner, to close off some of its formerly occupied cubicle space. For Belacqua, that has meant a shift to telecommuting, which most workdays spares him from making the long commute up 45 and on to the Beltway and back down again in the afternoon. A half-empty sort, Belacqua did not sound sanguine about his future prospects—perhaps explaining his professed desire to get in on the ground floor of SuperSexy Donuts®*—but his wife says he shouldn’t complain, and we agree. In his mid-50s, he’s finally achieved the real American Dream: He’s getting paid, and he doesn’t have to wear any pants to work.

*SuperSexy Donuts is a soon-to-be-registered trademark of Slampo’s Place Inc. All rights reserved.

The Absolutely Bestest Show on TV (As of This Fleeting Moment in Time)

A few weeks ago, while hurriedly passing through on our way to some larger point, we made the not-so-novel observation that HBO’s The Wire was the best show on television. We’re afraid, however, that this grand pronouncement proved to be just another of our transitory enthusiasms, because at the time we had not seen Last Dance, which we stumbled across on one of those cable stations that’s way, way up there on the digital dial.

You’ve seen Last Dance, haven’t you? The show about the geriatric dance troupe that travels from town to town, chasing the Terpsichorean muse and searching for late-life adventure? And by “dance” we don’t mean Arthur Murray or Lawrence Welk-style hoofery or even square-dancing or boot-scootin’. Nope, Last Dance shows America’s elders in all their butt-twitchin’, arm-thrusting, synchronized hip-hopping glory. It’s a brilliant idea (apparently no one has taken credit for Last Dance’s creation, although we detect the subtle hands of both The Sopranos’ David Chase and Deadwood’s David Milch, as well as some other guy named “David”), because if there’s one thing that Americans love even more than Joel Osteen, Internet porn and salty snacks, it’s watching old people dance like teenagers. And with the first of the nation’s Baby Boomers now eligible to draw Social Security, Last Dance is demographically right on time.

You can tell that Last Dance is something different from the opening credits, when a phalanx of Harley-riding geezers comes roaring out of the darkness, into the sunshine and toward the camera, their turkey wattles flappin’ in the breeze while Psychotic Reaction rises on the soundtrack (not the Count Five original, either---the Brenton Wood cover, which as scholars long ago confirmed is simply the backing track of the Count Five version with the Oogum Boogum Man’s vocal dubbed on top; Last Dance is too hip for the room---any room!). We can’t get enough of the dance routines, especially the weekly show-closing to Super Freak, but it’s the finely drawn characters and their stories that have kept us coming back week after week. The conceit, of course, is that all the dancers are over 70 and thus when off-stage susceptible to the insults of old age---tight bowels, loose dentures, dowager’s hump, debilitating arthritis, permanent erectile dysfunction, unexplained grumpiness, etc. When the lights go up they come alive as “one organism,” as the troupe’s director, a finicky 73-year-old gay man with a heart of gold, always says, but during their off-hours the characters fuss and fight, pair up for furtive sex (this is cable, so if you’d be offended by the sight of two fully unclothed 80 year olds going wham-jam on the queen-size of $79-a-night hotel room you’d best steer clear of Last Dance), commit gross infidelities, become addicted to gambling (slots, mostly) and various drugs (prescription and non-prescription), and are occasionally stalked by homicidal maniacs. It’s just like ER or Grey’s Anatomy (neither of which we’ve ever watched, so we’re just guessing here), except with an older cast and a grouchy female lead whose signature expression is “Suck my c—k, c---sucker.” (Again, the subtle hand of Milch?)

In an early episode that has “Emmy” written all over it, one of the troupe’s two black males decides he’s gay and “comes out” at age 83. His fellow dancers are accepting, except for one---the remaining straight black male of the troupe, who derides his former friend as a “butt-wheedlin’ sissy” (again, it’s cable). Of course, the bigot sees the error of his way after the newly gay character rescues him while the troupe is out ice fishing between Wisconsin engagements. The episode ended with a massive group hug, and if it doesn’t bring tears to your tired eyes have someone call the coroner, ’cause you ain’t got a pulse, Chester.

There’s a little somebody for everybody on Last Dance---a WASPy incontinent former corporate lawyer whose last divorce, from a 17-year-old Guatemalan mail-order bride, left him bankrupt and in need of work (“All my life, I’ve wanted to dance---to just get down,” he confides to another character). There’s a remarkably well-preserved Indo-American female named “Shiva,” as well as real-live American Indian (played by a real-live Indian) who often sits out the dance routines because they “shame” his ancestors. Our favorite, though, is the crotchety old Jewish guy, who is casually revealed in an early episode to be Israeli, which explains why he’s rude to everyone, including his 101-year-old mother, who travels with the troupe doing their laundry and whose frequent lapses into “dementia” provide some of the series’ more poignant plot twists. There’s even an elderly Italian-American, an ex-Mafioso with no 401(k) who looks suspiciously like the guy who played “Paulie Walnuts” on The Sopranos (it couldn’t be him, could it?).

Well, anyway, check it out: Last Dance is much, much better than John from Cincinnati.

Wait, scratch this posting: We just saw Drinking with the Stars.

Ain't Dark Yet (Keep Tellin' Yourself That)

Will Baby Boomers ever just shut the fuck up and slip away gracefully to the Old Folks Home?

Apparently not. Today’s Parade magazine (available in the deep recesses of Sunday newspapers everywhere) brings news that “Life Begins at 60.” This is one of those periodic generational updates from noted fabulist Gail Sheehy, who’s made a career of this sort of facile psychologizing (Passages, etc.) for nigh on a generation.

We didn’t have time to read the entire Parade article, because as a mid-range Baby Boomer* we know that our days are not limitless and the horizon draws close, and on top of that we just realized that we had stepped in some dogshit earlier when we were out poking around in the yard, and we gotta go take care of that business, soon.

Yet we did pause to peruse Parade’s gallery of celebrities who are turning 60 next year (the maximum age of the Baby Boom cohort), and we think that their scalpeled and Botoxed and Collagened faces (OK, not all of ‘em, but lots more than you’d think) argue strongly against Sheehy’s grandiloquent declaration. (Didn’t, by the way, life used to begin at 30? What happened with that?) These mug shots would actually seem to indicate that life is pretty much over at 60, that from there it’s just a quick roll downhill to mere oblivion and the waiting boneyard. Or many hours of plastic surgery.

There’s Reggie Jackson, now truly looking like Mr. October. Guy hasn’t hit a home run in 18 or 19 years, if we’re not mistaken. And Rollie Fingers, still with the mustache thing, but he hasn’t ambled out of the bullpen in a good two decades. Then there’s Donovan---Donovan!---who hasn’t charted a song since 1966 or 1967. Bill Clinton (not president for five years) Cher (yikes!). Sally Field (ditto). Sylvester Stallone, whose face gives us the mean shivers. Crackpot filmmaker Oliver Stone. Connie Chung (is she still trying to get pregnant?). Michael Milken, Tyne Daily and Jimmy Buffett, etc.

All these disparate personages shackled together on Parade’s geriatric chain gang have one thing in common: Their best work is behind them, whether it was relief pitching, singing Hurdy Gurdy Man, enacting welfare reform or using junk bonds to finance questionable corporate acquisitions.

Sheehy calls ages 50 through 75 “The Age of Mastery,” a concept we did not raise this morning when we spoke in the driveway with our 56-year-old (we think) next-door neighbor, who exhausted most of our conversational moment recounting in very fine detail his recent five-day stay in the VA Hospital. His confinement was occasioned by a urinary tract infection of unknown origin that caused, among other symptoms, his “right nutsack” to swell up “as big as a goddamn avocado.” (Maybe it was his left nutsack, we weren’t taking notes.)

He says he’s fine now, but it goes without saying that his longheld dream of dunking a basketball at age 60 has been dashed.

*But not “old.” Not us. No way. Never.

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