This witty blog is too good to miss -- though I'll warn you that it is liberal, feminist, and not afraid of 'language.' (The F word and the N word are banned.)
Then I found out that there's some on line discussion as to whether this blog is really written by a pair of octogenarians. Hmm. These ladies definitely don't fit most folks idea of eighty-somethings... these ladies rock!
And speaking of ageism, I'm still fuming over something I heard on an NPR interview with former poet laureate Donald Hall.
Hall, who is in his eighties and physically frail, told Fresh Air's Terry Gross of being in Washington, D.C., to receive the National Medal of Arts. Hall and his companion, Linda, decided to visit the National Portrait Gallery and they stopped in front of a sculpture created by Henry Moore, the subject of a 1965 New Yorker profile written by Hall.
"I can't stand for long, so my friend Linda was pushing me in a wheelchair, and at one point the guard came over and told us that this sculpture was a Henry Moore," he recalls. "My friend Linda thought of mentioning to him that I knew Moore pretty well, but we didn't ... and we went onto other things."
After lunch, they ran into the same guard, who asked Linda if she had a nice lunch and then leaned in closer to Hall's wheelchair.
"And he had an idiot grin and pointed a finger at me and said, 'Did we have a nice din-din?' " recalls Hall. "It was amazing. ... He talked baby talk at me. ... I was taken aback, totally taken aback and amused that he should make such a mistake. I wouldn't talk baby talk like that to a baby. Here he was, talking baby talk to an 82-year-old."
Appalling. But probably all too common that age and/or disability are equated with a lack of intelligence.
Next time, Mr. Hall, I'd suggest a quick upward thrust of the cane where it would do the most good. And then a quote from Monty Python.
"I'm not dead yet!"
