Middle Age Bites!

Okay, I know the fact that looking forward to the dawning of a new day partly because it means a big cup of coffee is a sign that I’m getting older. I accept the fact that the days of my giving up chocolate for a week and losing 10 pounds just like that, or sitting on my boyfriend’s shoulders at a concert on the beach are not just dead, but mummified and fossilized.

But, just how long has it been since those carefree days? This morning, as I waited for my coffee at the deli, I gazed over to a flat-screen TV in the store (they can no longer afford to put napkins on the counter, but they have a plasma TV…but that’s another story).

On the screen was a kindly old man singing the praises of Optimum Voice. Nice to see seniors getting some acting work, I thought. Now, I’ve seen the commercial hundreds of times, but never paid any attention. Today, though, there was something about the ascot-wearing old man’s voice that seemed vaguely familiar, as he facetiously asked, “Is it the way I say ‘Massapequa?’”

Then I realized that the old man with the dense white—not gray, white—hair was Barry Bostwick. Barry Fucking Bostwick! I remember when Barry Bostwick was a moderately foxy b-level/Lifetime actor, good for a little eye candy on a rainy Saturday afternoon when nothing was on TV. I know he was in Rocky Horror, but that’s not how I remember him. I remember him as the sexy villain or the passive-aggressive narcissist or the charming two-timer with the dowdy wife and the gorgeous mistress. He was one of those “older guys”—an occasional guilty pleasure among the scruffy long-haired musicians my friends and I thought were “cute”--with salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes so intense they should have been illegal.

Now he is, in the words of George Carlin, an old fuck!