My Decade of Turning 50

I think I was 40 when I was offered my first senior discount, which must have said something about the kind of night I had the day before I stopped in Mickey D’s for some coffee. I was, like, dude, I’m only, like, barely over 30. But this column raises an interesting point — will [...]

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I wonder what it would be like to be turning 50 years old on Halloween? With all the attention to Halloween these days, it could be one fun party. (I was watching a news report tonight on a costume contest at a local “active adult” community, and the couple who won were dressed as sheep, [...]

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Is turning 50 years old worse than turning 40? I was reading an excerpt from Turning 50: Quotes, Lists and Helpful Hints by William K. Klingaman, who also wrote a book on turning 40 years old. He says most people regard turning 50 “a considerably less traumatic experience” than turning 40. One reason he cites [...]

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I went to a wedding yesterday. Always good when I at least am younger than the parents of the bride and groom…TV Land today is showing a bunch of Leave it to Beaver shows, in honor of its 50th anniversary…Bruce Springsteen — age 58! — was on 60 Minutes tonight. It’s been 32 years since [...]

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Wednesday (Sept. 26) marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of West Side Story on Broadway. I did the show in high school, playing a Jet called Mouthpiece, which seemed a funny name since I had few lines. (I went to an all boys high school, Cardinal Hayes in the Bronx, and we brought in [...]

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Oh a story I just read brought back memories of first going online, in those heady days of chat rooms in AOL — the smiley face ASCII art — you know, these — is turning 25 years old. According to this article: Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to [...]

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I ran a post recently with the YouTube video of “Done Got Old“, which made me think about some other songs about aging that could be used for a slideshow or roast for a baby boomer turning 50 years old. There are a couple of obvious ones — The Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four,” or Frank [...]

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My other favorite boomer blog, The Boomer Chronicles, weighs into with a post titled “Male Menopause is an oxymoron.” I remember sitting through a conference workshop in the mid-1990s on this subject, and both blushing and leaving the room in fear of my 50s. Of course, at 40-something, 50 seemed a distance island I would [...]

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I’ve been thinking some about songs appropriate for turning 50 (hey, it’s not all about jokes!). My favorite is Buddy Guy’s version of “Done Got Old.” I could see someone using part of it in a video tribute, or buy it in iTunes and lay it under a slideshow of the person turning 50 for [...]

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I’m probably the last guy to see this, but it is both fun and scary — it’s the AARP rap. Unlike other stuff on YouTube, this isn’t a parody, unless you consider it self-parody, since it appears made by AARP. For whom? I wouldn’t want to guess with lines like “One thing you have to [...]

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