Too Long at the Fair

Being a senior citizen who still remembers nearly everything and continues to be disappointed with the world around me, I had attempted to do either a book or a series of articles written by famous senior citizens, globally, under the overall title "Have I Lived Too Long." The idea, still viable, is for statesmen, educators, actors and actresses, and other former influential spill their guts about how disappointing things have become. It is sadly a fact that, despite the Internet and all sorts of wireless techno0logy and computerized manufacturing, the world in which I reside is not the comfortable, mostly peaceful and not the vicious, dog-eat-dog competitiveness of the world I spent most of my years in.

I grew up with television, not merely watching it but being involved in it. I grew up with clever people doing clever things- even in black and white on small screens. Today only David Letterman and Bill Maher exhibit cleverness and even whimsy. There were Jack Paar and Steve Allen late night, still superior to David Letterman. We had comedians, even on Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights that could be funny without the f- word or other foul-mouth language. And could you imagine the creators of All in the Family or Mary Tyler Moore turning out garbage like Mike and Molly or 2 Broke Girls? Living in New York, I saw the best performers of the 20^th Century- the Lunts, Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Lena Horne, Edith Piaf, Marcel Marceau, Bert Lahr, Zero Mostel, Gwen Verdon, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Robert Preston, Shirley Booth---I could go on and on, and I haven't even touched my neighbors in New York- John Lennon and Lauren Bacall, Merv Griffin and Basil Rathbone and Zinka Milanov, Alfredo Krauss, Renata Tebaldi and Shelley Winters and Farley Granger and Tennessee Williams. I direxted Eva Gabor and Anita Gillette.

I didn't vote for Bob Dole or Barry Goldwater or Dwight Eisenhower, but I would certainly have preferred them to the 3 Stooges imitators masquerading as Republican Presidential candidates. I don't miss the Saturday Evening Post or Colliers or Liberty (although in grade school I went door to door trying to sell Liberty and Benarr McFadden physical culture magazines.) I am glad that the New Yorker is still around, although I miss Charles Addams and Pauline Kael and John O'Hara and John Updike and James Thurber among many others.

I lived through World War II, escaping from Germany one day before that infamous Kristallnacht.- I saw Hitler and FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Gorbachev. I wrote speeches for Nelson Rockefeller and JFK. I took the #1 train to gawk at the Stonewall gay uprising in Sheridan Square and Christopher Street. The sitcom I thought I had sold was pushed aside because the producers had hired Sean Connery for a major motion picture (Hunt for Red October). I worked on a film with Hungary's top director, Karoly Makk, and spent time behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest. I got fired in Munich from a musical I was commissioned to write based on a Damon Runyon story.

I fell in love a lot and even got my heart broken once or twice. In many ways, my longevity has not been a total waste, although I have not yet accomplished a lot of the things I had hoped would come so easily and successfully to me.

There is only one thing that continues to bother me- all those ads with lovable senior citizen actors trying to persuade me to change my Medicare providers. I urge all seniors to read the fine print carefully- and maybe more than once. A lot of the promises are lost with parentheses of "maybe" and "not if" disclaimers. Be skeptical. These advertisers are looking at their bottom lines not at your continued good healthcare. Anyway, when all is said and done and memories continue to flood my present, I really cannot complain- except to continue to believe things were better once than they are today.