Another tiny Stevie mention...

[Livia]

Hipsterectomy, Part I
- Neva Chonin
Sunday, January 22, 2006

Oh, the ignominy of time.

As I type on my ancient laptop, I'm gazing out on the 27th straight day of rain in Issaquah, Wash. Below is a vast parking lot; in the distance, a pimple of a mountain. Surrounding me, the retirement home inhabited by my little Lithuanian mama. And as always while visiting my old Pacific Northwest stomping grounds, and it's raining outside, and I'm in mama's retirement home, thoughts turn to temporal matters. This is understandable in a building filled with electric-blue walkers, sure, but it's not the prospect of someday using a walker that bedevils me. It's the worry that I'm going to end up an eccentric old bat with orange hair who dies while watching TV and is subsequently eaten by cats.

Spare me lectures about aging-as-a-journey and the Wisdom of Elders. First, "wise" and "old" are not synonymous. Wisdom is a symptom of experience, not time. Ignorant young yahoos grow into ignorant old yahoos, full stop. Second, I am not typing in the rain because I want to ponder the epistemology of dotage. I just want to talk aesthetics. Mine and yours. Our teeth, our hair, our clothes, our souls.

Ecoutez, dudes. As the years spin past, I find myself increasingly consumed by a premonition. Lately this premonition has acquired proportions so hideously Dantean as to make me shudder, like the Reaper's breath blowing in my ear. It goes like so: Someday I'll be traipsing down Valencia Street, wearing my usual ensemble of tatty black sweater and awkward trousers. A young masher will whistle from behind, assuming I'm some rambling hipster chick with nothing better to do than gambol with lewd strangers. But! When I turn around to say something brilliantly cutting, he cowers. His lip curls in disgust. "Oh, you sad old thing," he moans, "For shame!"

See? See? My greatest fear is that I'll cross the nebulous line into anachronism without realizing it. You know what I mean. The biker-chick syndrome; Auntie Mame run through a meat grinder. This is what happens when one's style fails to evolve with one's vintage. The Experts claim we cling to the era in which we came of age or were the happiest. Thus, people become bulletin boards for their treasured memories. They cling to shoulder pads and big hair that would put A Flock of Seagulls to shame; they devolve into hippie fossils with thinning gray hair that flaps in the breeze; they peg their trousers in a boot-cut world. I don't want this to happen to me. Please don't let this happen to me. I have been to Stevie Nicks concerts where women wear Farrah flips and their men boast feathered bangs. There is obviously an underground network. There is obviously a conspiracy to make aging an exercise in humiliation.

My paranoia knows no bounds. The last time I visited Europe, leg warmers were everywhere. Truth? I needed leg warmers because blood flows to my extremities with the vigor of a narcoleptic slug. But I feared leg warmers. On someone a decade younger, they were retro chic; on me, they could be read as simply retro -- as in, maybe I never stopped wearing them to begin with.

My friend Lola, who owns a vomiting cat, understands my fears. She encourages me to watch "What Not to Wear." This is the Learning Channel's exercise in makeover terrorism, in which fashion casualties are hounded into spending $5,000 on a dull new wardrobe. I have become addicted to this show. But where Lola views "What Not to Wear" as guidance, I read it as a warning, showing me what not to wear so as to avoid winding up on "What Not to Wear." God knows I don't want to look like the program's victims, quashed into mainstream pulp because they let themselves slide and must now pay with their individuality. But I don't want my bad taste to frighten people on the street, either. The trick is how to remain cool without becoming corpse-cold.

My friend Sybella, who owns two vomiting cats, shares my worry. "The problem," she posits, "is that we never expected to live past 30." She's right. In our circle, we focused on living fast and dying young. Some actually succeeded in this endeavor. But what about those left behind, we who flouted life's speed limits without crashing and burning? It seems we must now wear neutral colors and subtle highlights. We must cruise, as it were, in fashion's far-right lane lest we cause aesthetic pileups. What else can we do? There's no handbook on how to navigate the post-cool world. We need guidance.

So here I sit in my mama's retirement home, watching the rain and contemplating obsolescence. I have two hangnails. My short toes trouble me. I fret that wearing black makes me look like a Gothic relic. Can I still use the word grrrl without irony? Do I need new teeth? And what about my hair? Will it clash with an electric-blue walker? Such is the lot of an aging hipster. •

Tell Neva what not to wear at [email protected].

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