Aging Peter Pans
CURRIE, SUSIE
Aging Peter Pans You'd be surprised by the number of Americans who won't grow up.' by Susie Currie The week I began reading Rejuvenile, a local skateboarder was killed by a car. He was 42. After a...
...If I had kids, I'd have to compete with them for all my toys," he explains...
...Augustine defined freedom as the ability to choose the good...
...So is this a bad thing...
...In its freest forms, it can even approach the profound...
...Whereas some people might interpret joining an inner-child playgroup as a cry for help, he seems eager to see all but the most obvious slackers through Briar Rose-colored glasses...
...Elsewhere, Noxon names the original triumvirate of reju-veniles: J.M...
...In 1999, one San Francisco woman quit her job in publishing to become a "professional skipper," a movement that, at its height, had "group skips" in 65 cities, he writes...
...It was really a death march...
...Network...
...But, asserts the author, people playing with toys their peers outgrew, oh, sometime during the Reagan administration is "certainly not a harbinger of the downfall of Western civilization...
...now it's the ability to spend your entire paycheck on paintball supplies...
...Adults with drivers' licenses who love skateboards, skipping, and stickball...
...Any thinking rejuvenile," the author concludes, "can't help but wonder whether his or her dedication to play and love of kid stuff will at some point—if it hasn't already—morph from fun and free-spirited to just plain pathetic...
...It's worth noting what we've lost in the process (fedoras were spiffy...
...I like Play-Doh as much as the next parent, and some of the stories made me smile at recognizing a kindred spirit (for me, it was the roller-coaster aficionado...
...The world of Disnoids—those who visit the park several times a week, or even daily—is a compelling place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there...
...This is evident in the way several of these adultescents view their own parents, who outrageously modeled self-sacrifice rather than self-actualization...
...Play, to the modern rejuvenile, is indeed the whole point of life...
...Among those he fingers as a Codger is Joseph Epstein, whose essay on "The Perpetual Adolescent" appeared in these pages...
...civility is always nice)," Noxon admits, "but there's no denying how much freedom adults have gained...
...Happily, his sympathies don't prevent him from occasionally telling The Rest of The Story...
...The Magic Kingdom looms so large in the rejuvenile pantheon that it gets its own chapter...
...His whole life was about providing and fitting a mold and marching on until it's over...
...After a moment of silence, it might occur to you to wonder: Just what was he doing cavorting around on four wheels when he could have been behind one...
...The author gamely tries to show both sides of the maturity debate, and claims that the rejuvenile label is intended to be "value neutral...
...Now the whole thing has been reversed—play is now the primary thing and adult roles and working have become repulsive...
...And hey look, there's Groomsman Mickey in the wedding album...
...After coming to terms with his own rejuvenile tendencies, which run to cartoons and kickball, he set out to find like-minded souls...
...That ground, well-trodden by other writers, is not covered here...
...Creepiness sometimes spills over into other areas...
...the 37-year-old Tinkerbell collector who says he spends 90 percent of his free time doing something Disney-related...
...But Disney addicts, it turns out, are just one of the species in the genus Rejuvenile...
...Although we're only around 4.5 percent of the world's population, we buy 45 percent of the world's toys...
...I came to think of the border between adulthood and childhood as a Cold War checkpoint," he writes, "once spotlit and armed, now unguarded and porous"—an apt analogy, as kids now run toward the door marked Adults Only as fast as their elders are doubling back...
...One quote from an anthropology professor is telling, and worth more exploration than Noxon gives it...
...I'm gonna miss my gas payments to buy a dirt bike...
...The Los Angeles father of three coined the term "rejuvenile" to describe someone who cultivates the tastes and mindsets of a much younger person...
...Noxon knows his lingo and freely shares it, which makes for a fun read...
...He actively shuns the "adult" label, explaining, "I'm not responsible and I'm not going to be on time and I'm going to come home with chocolate cake on my shirt...
...One 25-year-old New Yorker who enjoys Chuck E. Cheese outings, pigtails, coloring books, and stuffed animals says these all point towards a basic philosophy: "No matter what the world throws at me and how many times people disappoint me, I continue to believe that people are good and reliable until they prove otherwise," she explains, inadvertently revealing that she may have watched too many Miss America pageants as an actual child...
...Barrie, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll, born Charles Dodgson, none of whose lives had a storybook ending...
...Grays on trays" are snowboarding seniors, and urban hipsters play Parkour, which, for all you frozen-in-amber Codgers, is a daredevil sport that apparently blends the shenanigans of Spiderman and turn-of-the-century street urchins...
...The most watched cable station among 18-to-34 year olds isn't CNN—it's CN, as in Cartoon Susie Currie is a writer in Maryland...
...One woman who has "built her life around . . . board games, swing sets [and] amusement parks" remembers with disgust her truck-driving father's mantra: You do what you have to do...
...Kidult, Peterpandemonium, and adul-tescent are all names for this limbolike state between adolescence and adulthood that many find (or put) themselves in...
...That's a question more than a few of his subjects would do well to ponder...
...They seem unimpressed with the virtues of hardship," Noxon notes...
...And half of adult visitors to Disneyworld come without kids...
...Fairy Tale Weddings enables actual brides in Cinderella-blue gowns to arrive at the castle in a glass coach pulled by miniature white ponies...
...But their hold on the public never approached the viselike grip that Walt Disney continues to have...
...Long thought of as a kids' paradise, Disney's worlds attract grownups by the thousands, and not just for Space Mountain...
...However, that's not the first adjective that springs to mind when meeting most of his subjects...
...To them, suffering is vastly overrated"— and, he doesn't add, perhaps underex-perienced...
...The author leaves us guessing at what the grooms know about all this and when they knew it...
...Skipping on sidewalks is one thing, skipping the car payment is another...
...In most cultural contexts, play prepares children to move into adult roles," says Bryan Page of the University of Miami...
...The wife is president of the 130-member Arielholics Rejuvenile Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grownup by Christopher Noxon Crown, 288 pp., $23.95 Anonymous, named for Disney's Little Mermaid, and her home is a shrine to the fictional redhead...
...Christopher Noxon may have the answer...
...But he tips his hand early on when he sneers at those from the "Harrumphing Codger School of Adulthood," i.e., people who look askance at adults behaving like children...
...More often, though, they made my skin crawl: The 33-year-old screenwriter who says her primary relationship is with a stuffed animal that dates from her college years...
...Americans spend more than $600 billion a year on recreation...
...and a curious category of those who forgo having children so they can spend more time acting like them...
...For some, it seems, golden pins have replaced the golden calf: "I am now complete," asserted the husband, after dropping $100 on a rare Ariel pin...
...I never understood that," she told the author, presumably with a straight face...
...Take (please) the married Nevada man who quit his job at IBM to spend more time with his video games and action figures...
...the Boomerangs, who share a roof with the 'rents while attending pajama parties with friends from junior high...
...If so, might we be forgiven for thinking that if some of these people were any shallower, they'd be the Sahara...
...Consider the childless (oops, child free) Ohio couple in their forties who have annual season passes not only to the two stateside Disney wonderlands, but also Tokyo Disney and Euro Disney near Paris, and they spend at least a weekend a month at one of the parks...
...One Hollywood toy collector, who claims Fred Flintstone and Herman Munster as role models, named his son Damien Hellion...
...Those who collect Legos, Barbies, and trading cards as well as a paycheck...
...Others we meet are the Playalong Parent, for whom playing is an integral part of parenting...
...At 35, though, she had mounting debts and no stable job, so she had to go get one...
...Now, he's in front of a computer up to 16 hours a day playing various complex games and publishing strategy guides for them...
...He did, in droves: People with graduate degrees playing marbles, video games, and Duck Duck Goose...
...Noxon asserts that this seismic sociological shift looks as if it's here to stay, and he offers some jaw-dropping statistics as proof...
Vol. 12 • February 2007 • No. 20
