Yukking It Up

We walked in together and quickly grabbed the last available seats in the row of bleachers in the small performance space. He was good looking--in his 40s--with dark graying hair. 'Oh, this might be interesting,' I thought to myself. We didn't know each other, but we were both here for the same reason -- to prove our "good parent" bonafides by sitting through two hours of middle school dances just to see our kids on stage for five minutes of it. The bleacher seats were made for elementary school kids, so after ten minutes, we were all ready to unfold ourselves and stretch out. I'm short, and this was the first time in my life I've ever had an issue with leg space.

"Now I know what Lebron James feels like stuffed in the back of a Mini Cooper," I said to the "lucky" bleacher people within my proximity. I got a few laughs from that, then I thought of something better. Same joke, new variation. "I feel like I'm one of those clowns stuck in a clown car," I said to my new BFFs stuck in the bleachers with me. And that's when I heard it. WTH? I thought. It sounded like a cross between an out-of-breath high-pitched wheeze and a theremin, that eerie music in creepy old movies about ghosts. But not just a theremin -- a theremin that sounded slightly off, like an old music box that has gone out of tune after you've opened and played it ten thousand times. (Although really, how can you tell the difference between a theremin that is in tune and one that is not?)

I turned my head and stared at Handsome 40s next to me. He was laughing, not having the asthma attack I feared. I tried to pretend I hadn't heard that disconcerting, awful sound, as the next dance started. When the lights came up and the group of dancers were taking their bows, I cracked another joke, in part because I just couldn't let a good joke die inside me without it being uttered publicly. But I also wanted to find out what Handsome 40s's real laugh sounded like. I was disappointed to realize that the dying asthmatic theremin *was* his real laugh. I quit making jokes after that. But some of the dances had wonderful comic moments, and so I was treated to interludes of the dying asthmatic theremin all evening. 

I wondered if he had ever gotten laid with a "laugh" like that. (Sure, he was a parent, but his kid could have been adopted.) Though it may be as capricious as a Seinfeld episode, crossing a guy off your dateable list just because he doesn't have an acceptable laugh seems perfectly acceptable to me. A laugh is something that signifies momentary pure joy -- an unexpected small gift from the Universe -- so if you can't let loose with a big hearty guffaw when you are rewarded with something funny, I am suspicious of your ability to *ever* let loose and momentarily enjoy life. While some people use a handshake to quickly size up a person's character, I use laughter. 

A Friday Night of Wistfulness and Loud Shitty Music

I did not want to be there. It had been a crazy, exhausting week at work, and all I wanted to do was go home and crash on the couch next to my dog, who likes to watch the same tv shows I do. But I had made a promise, so there I was, waiting in a long line. Stuck. From the moment I walked in, I felt like an unwelcome interloper. The music was predictably awful, made worse by an insipidly glib dj. The room was jammed with *much* younger guys and girls who were adamant about only making eye contact with each other, not with anyone older. The girls were beautiful and tiny -- 30 years of "oh, just another bite" hadn't caught up with them yet -- and almost all were dressed in shiny short dresses and impossibly high heels. The jeans, black shirt, and boots I was wearing made me feel all fifty of my years and then some, as I watched the dance floor from the periphery. I may as well have been using a walker.

"I wish I were young again," said my middle-aged friend Sherry, wistful as we watched the exuberant much younger crowd dance to the loud shitty music. "I wish I had a beer right now," I answered with equal wistfulness in my voice. And we both hung out in the back of the room taking it all in, and shaking our middle-aged moneymakers to the beat of that loud shitty music.

This is how I spent my Friday night. Not out clubbing in some hopelessly misguided attempt to recapture the carefree joie de vivre of one's early 20s, but volunteering as a chaperone at my 13-year-old daughter's eighth grade formal dance. And not just chaperoning. I was helping serve dinner -- a veritable lunch lady -- so I was below the lowest of the low in the middle school pecking order. My status was on par with that of the janitor.

My daughter was annoyed at me for volunteering to be a chaperone. She was afraid she'd be judged for *my* usual embarrassing behavior -- my "excessive" friendliness with strangers and my inability to consistently refrain from using my pet names for her when we're in public. (Two years later, and I'm still in the doghouse for the infamous sixth grade "Hey, Squirt" incident.) But I was good. I only talked to her once during the dance, and for the most part, I kept my big embarrassing mouth shut. Every time I was tempted to compliment a girl on her lovely dress, I bit my tongue and repressed the urge, because I didn't want to ruin her night. No teenage girl is going to be flattered by the compliment on her dress that comes from a middle-aged lunch lady. She might, in fact, be reduced to tears. If anyone's going to cry at a middle school dance, it's going to be due to what some boy did or didn't do or say, not because the lunch lady gave you a thumbs-up on your dress.

I couldn't help but think back to my own middle school dances, much less formal affairs that took place in the gymnasium, with all the girls on one side of the cavernous room and all the boys on the other. From today's perspective, the middle school dances of my youth were more similar in spirit (and looks) to an Amish barn raising than my daughter's dance, which felt more like a non-alcoholic rave fueled by the giddy excitement of young teenagers drunk on the possibilities of life. It was infectious, and even I couldn't help getting caught up in the mood. Watching my daughter fully engaged in unselfconscious fun for three hours more than made up for a night of loud shitty music.

In the Room the Women Come and Go Talking to Online Gigilos

My friend, who is going through a divorce, recently tried online dating and had the usual reaction we all do at first: horror -- complete and utterly mesmerized horror. He would message me in reactive despair after taking brief peeks inside the online-dating big tent, a Pandora's box of human desire that lays bare an embarrassing mixture of clueless bravado, breathtaking superficiality, weary optimism, quiet revelation, and a deep yearning to connect that will break your heart.

This is the same friend who will quote lines from T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at times when life seems almost unbearable. Well, who would have thunk it? My Prufrockian friend is horrified by online dating. Hmmm... who put the chocolate in my peanut butter?

I suggested he should take down his profile and replace it with the online dating profile that J. Alfred Prufrock would have posted, had he been real and middle-aged now. Can you imagine the reaction he'll get to a profile explicitly filled with regret, thwarted desire, disillusionment, sexual frustration, and social isolation due to an inability to act? In a world that richly rewards self-confidence (warranted or not), is there a less likely candidate for cyber-dating success than J. Alfred? When you're a sensitive, thoughtful person devoted more to the life of the mind, instead of how hot you look in that photo, online dating seems as likely a place to find a soul mate as standing in line at the DMV. Posting J. Alfred Prufrock's dating profile is a snarky way to laugh at the huge limitations of internet dating.

I admit I may have been too hasty in dismissing the possibility of finding someone on a dating website. The problem might lie in using a gigantic dating website that really is the match-making equivalent of waiting in line at the DMV. Perhaps I need to find the dating website that is the equivalent of browsing in the literary section of an upscale bookstore. And if it's not out there, maybe I need to create it. I'll call it "Measuring out my Love Life with Coffee Spoons: a Dating Website for the J. Alfred Prufrocks of the World and Other Sensitive, Creative Types."

Burqa to the Left of Me, Barbie to the Right, Here I Am -- Stuck in the Middle Askew

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I lived in a high-rise apartment building near one of the big universities. After having lived in a house for the previous six years, it kind of felt like I was living in a dorm again -- thankfully a dorm mostly filled with responsible students who studied all the time, so noise was rarely an issue. My floor was an eclectic crazy quilt of ages and ethnicities, which, at the time I thought was unusual, but after having lived here in LA for more than a decade, I realize is the norm.

One of my neighbors was a 22-year-old Barbie Doll who only wore trendy neon-colored workout clothes two sizes too small or, when she felt like dressing up, a bikini top and cutoffs. She was aggressively blonde and always displaying the merchandise. If Dolly Parton had channeled her creative energy into exercise, instead of music, she would have looked like my neighbor Barbie Doll.

At the other end of the spectrum, there was the Muslim wife and mother of two young kids who always wore a floor-length black burqa with a small rectangular slit that only revealed her eyes. I never saw her in anything else, even while she was doing laundry or just taking her trash to the garbage chute. Burqa lived at one end of the hall, while Barbie Doll was at the other. And then there's Maude -- smack dab in the middle -- harshly judging both of them for the same thing: dressing as female caricatures in deference to men. I was having none of it -- this dressing-to-please-men nonsense.

I viewed Barbie Doll with disdain because I assumed she spent lots of time and energy in exchange for male approval for something as superficial as her looks. I judged Burqa for covering up her entire body, with the presumption that she was doing it to please her husband. It was a hot summer in LA, and here was Burqa dressed head to toe in a voluminous black robe made of polyester. It seemed like a ridiculous accommodation to her husband's presumed needs entirely at the expense of her own.

Truth was I was wearing my own particular version of a burqa: baggy unisex beige clothing from L.L. Bean that did a better job of camouflaging my body than a burqa. I was hiding in plain sight, and no one was interested in looking. When I think back to that time, even at 34, I felt invisible in that same way that many American women over 50 feel.

Back then I thought I was lucky to be married to an "enlightened" husband who didn’t care about my looks. I had deluded myself with the smug idea that we had a love based on things superior to the raw impetuousness of physical attraction. In the aftermath of my divorce, I realized just how much I had overestimated my ex’s esteem for me. Not only did he not care about what I looked like, it turned out he didn’t give a crap about my other “less superficial” qualities either.

So, now guess who's dressing in a way that (hopefully) gets her noticed. Not traffic-stopping noticed -- just a bit of a lingering glance noticed. Nothing dramatic. Nothing Italian. Despite wanting to think otherwise, I've come to believe that physical attraction is one of several important ingredients in the glue that keeps a good relationship together. If it weren't so important, wouldn't we *all* be dressing in unisex baggy L.L. Bean clothing in various shades of beige?