It’s About Time

Don’t get scared, but at some point you may be sitting in a bar with friends, same as ever, and when you look up from your drink you realize you are the oldest people in the room—by a decade at least. Next thing you know, you are swaying alone in the corner, lipstick too bright, purse from 2008, to The Smiths, thankful that it’s “good” ‘80s and not Nu Shooz. Or worse, regaling strangers about how the neighborhood used to be. This spectacle is what Logan’s Run was meant to prevent.

So, it turns out that I’m middle-aged. I didn’t think this occurred until you were a divorced empty-nester. (Or in Brooklyn’s case, the parent of a toddler–-is that too salty? I’m old, so I’m losing the ability to tell if off-the-cuff observations now read as offensive.) Apparently, it can happen to anyone.

I originally started this site after I found myself living in Williamsburg at 40, single for the first time this millennium. I made it my mission to survey the scene for the elusive drinking establishment where women over 39 weren’t extinct. I’m now a few years older (and minutely wiser) and live in a part of Queens where the only bars are for Latino men to dance with women they pay or for Latino men to dance with men for freeand have moved back to my hometown of Portland, Oregon after 20 years away. Now, I’m even more lost than before.

I’ve since widened my scope to include non-young women drinking on screen,  double-standards about going gray, how Gen X slacked themselves out of the generational conversation, and interviews with women doing cool things. Still, I can’t help but scan a bar, show, or club (who am I kidding? I don’t go to clubs) for evidence of like-minded ladies.

Maybe some of you will join me here?