Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 34

The Tribe . . .

—From EF—

If you’re reading this, it means you’re a reader, and as a reader you’ve probably had the experience of turning a book’s last page and wanting to growl, “No! Don’t stop there!” I stayed up late to finish Lab Girl, a memoir by Hope Jahren, and hop-scotched through the night on the energy of it, half in dream, half in memory.

Hope and her lab partner Bill, paleobiologists, logged miles and weeks and decades together in research road trips, obsessed with the plant world’s intricate wisdom and ability to survive, “interviewing” trees and moss and vines, living and dead, giving them a chance to be heard and seen and understood. Obsession, yes, beautiful and necessary, and hard to live with.

Through the night, I was flashing through our own miles and weeks and decades of road trips, the two of us sometimes with another actor or two, sometimes with a kid or two, always on our way to perform for people who don’t go to the theatre. We created plays and comic sketches and one hideous exploration of family violence and played them in churches and gyms and prisons and coffeehouses. We wrote them because they wanted to be written, and played them because they wanted to be heard and seen. Obsession.

This weekend I spent time with a brilliant woman in her eighties who has been writing and publishing for more than thirty years, in addition to being a fierce advocate for the earth and all creatures upon and within it. She’s still at it, all of it, and has just completed a new book. Cecile Pineda, keep going, your obsession is vital.

Our friend and mentor Leon Katz died a year ago at the age of 97, and in his final weeks he had to be dissuaded from doing a few last edits on his lifework, The Notebooks of Gertrude Stein. He’d been tussling with that since 1952. Obsession.

To me, aging is almost like mountain-climbing. The longer you do it, the more clearly you see where the peaks are. In our own creation of plays, and now novels, we’ve always had each other, but there’s a wonderful jazz in discovering others of a similar persuasion: Look, it’s not just us, we’re part of a tribe. There’s a beauty in finding the next new peak.

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Comedy Tonight . . .

—CB—

This week we had two performances of Survival, Elizabeth’s solo show. Both had wonderfully responsive audiences, 20-25 people at each. One was for an elder-housing complex, the other a house concert mainly drawn from the poetry community. These were the tenth and eleventh showings of the piece, and it’s starting to find its rhythm.

The greatest challenge in our performance work—now spanning 47 years, about 4,000 performances in 38 states—is to survive the infancy of a new comic piece. Experience counts, but on the other hand, it tells you how far, at the outset, you still have to go to get where you want to go. You’ve made that journey so many times: you’re like a toddler watching the Olympics on TV, terrified how many stumbles you’ll have to make just to walk across the living room, much less to run the high hurdles.

The actor in conventional theatre, having five weeks to rehearse and maybe four weeks’ performance run has one advantage: he doesn’t know, on opening night, how much further he has to go. We’ve had comic sketches that we’ve performed perhaps 500 to 1,000 times for every sort of audience, and there are still lines we tinker with, in their phrasing or their timbre or their business, to get the response we ought to get. The stand-up comic may spend weeks or months to polish his 20-minute routine and still be subject to the enormous variations that come with audience or locale or the flow of booze.

What you learn instinctively about pace and inflection and response may work brilliantly for one show and be totally irrelevant to the next, as character adds a whole new dimension: Woody Allen’s material wouldn’t have worked too well for Don Rickles, nor Robin Williams’ for Jack Benny. With Survival, we’re just starting to succeed in the “range-finding”—the sense of how these lines come out of the specific characters Elizabeth plays, a sense of how the comic line sets up its premises, how it snaps the whip to “release” the laugh, and how that all comes out of the character’s reality.

Meantime, we’ve juggled some structure, revised various lines, clarified transitions, but it’s mainly a matter of making the humor work in the mouth of the character, finding where the fifty minutes needs to “breathe,” and adapting to the rhythms of each audience. The toddler watching the Olympics will get there some day if he keeps his toddle true, but he can only do it a step at a time.

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Creaking Open a Door . . .

—From EF—

It’s a damned heady experience to stand before a door you thought you’d already opened, then open it. The sudden flood of light is magnificent. I’ve just finished binge-reading Johann Hari’s Lost Connections, and I’m still giddy.

It’s a close-up personal examination of depression and anxiety and the way our society deals with such things. It digs in its heels and roars “Fuck, that’s all wrong!” For those who still value the methods of science, the studies and interviews and analyses are meticulously documented. The author asks, “Please look up and read the scientific studies . . . and try to look at them with the same skepticism that I brought to them. Kick the evidence. See if it breaks.” I kicked the tires, then got in, sat down, and revved the engine.

I was massively prone to depression for a long time, and then sometime in my forties I got a handle on it. It went away—for a while. Recently, the Black Dog has come back. I’ve been baffled. Why now? Artistically and economically and emotionally, things are uncommonly good, so why am I revisiting all these high-school tropes, the anxiety attacks and obsessive attention to things that insulate me from being there? Now I may have a clue, or at least a side-street to explore.

The overall thrust of the book is that depressed folk are neither brain-defective nor self-pitying nor weak, and that the socioeconomic world within which they live is much more nuts than they are. Brain chemistry and genetics aren’t irrelevant, but they neither tell the whole story nor provide the sole path to stable ground. Something has to change in the toxic world that surrounds us.

I endured my childhood abuse as something I deserved, being defective in such profound ways. “You don’t know how to love. You have no sense of humor, no voice, no looks. You’ll never get a man: better get a teaching certificate.” Later, when I realized this was abusive, I still somehow felt, “You had it coming, you’re whining, feeling sorry for yourself.” Learning that most abused kids feel they’re to blame didn’t entirely wipe that out.

Then I took a solo trip to the area where I grew up and spontaneously paid a visit to the man whose parents had been our closest neighbors, a farm fifteen minutes down our rural road. After getting some conversational ease, he opened up. “You know, we all saw what was happening to you, but we didn’t have any idea what to do.” That took my breath away. It wasn’t my imagination, I wasn’t exaggerating: someone had seen me.

So now I’m trying to be the one who sees me. In the past year I’ve been part of some well-led medicine circles. I had high hopes, having had universally warm and enlightening experience with entheogens in the past. Now? Damn, it got embarrassing and boring circling back and back and back to howling grief. But Johann Hari was told, while he was almost dying from pesticide poisoning in North Korea and begging for medication to stop the violent retching, “You need your nausea. It is a message. It will tell us what is wrong with you.”

I suspect that my deep grief is telling me that something dark is still down at my core, triggered by something new in my life, and I need to listen. Maybe that’s an apt metaphor for all of us in these days.

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Empathy . . .

—CB—

I’ve never spent a lot of time asking myself about “my purpose in life.” One does, of course, in writing your college admissions essay, but after that it’s catch as catch can. There’s your mission statement for your theatre company, dozens of grant applications in which you’re required to tell how your staging of KING LEAR will save the world, and you get to the point where you can bang that off pretty glibly. You can even convince yourself you believe it.

Still, it’s been a long road since I first became immersed in high school theatre as a way to meet girls. I don’t think my work will remotely impact the state of the world, any more than giving a buck to a beggar will solve poverty or even turn his life around. But why then do I put it out there?

First off, I guess, because I believe that one gift in one moment, tiny though it is, is a worthy act. Our lives are made up of tiny moments and tiny gifts. I don’t know, can’t know, if our show on Sunday for eleven people added richness, fullness, renewal to anyone’s life—or would have if it’d been eleven thousand—but we do what we can, whatever the sum of the pocket change. Your mileage may vary.

For me, the great crying thirst of the world is for empathy. Politicians preach empathy for those who will vote for them, but the greatest need is for a feeling with the other. We accuse our opponents of being “soft on communism,” “soft on crime,” all that: we want leaders whose hardness is credible, implacable. We want to be led by rhinos.

 

One of Shakespeare’s achievements is his empathy with villains. Not that we want Edmund or Iago or Macbeth to win, but we’re induced to see the world—and themselves—from their perspective. I’m a great fan of political satire, be it in cartoons or out of the mouths of comics, but these shorthand modes of making a point leapfrog over the harder job of a clear perception of what drives Putin or Trump or Kim Jong Un or the mugger, the bond trader, the ideologue or the knacker. Empathy is a luxury item, only to be worn on Easter Sunday.

Performing or writing, for me, is a drop in the vast bucket of human experience. It may, rarely, mark its tattoo on another’s life. It may— Well, I know a couple who met by argument in the lobby of one of our shows. It may be a passing moment: “That was pretty funny . . .” But if, in that fifty minutes or two hours that you have their focus, or the time it takes them to plow through your novel, you can induce them to feel what each of your characters feels, you’ve offered them the greatest gift. You’ve offered them humanity.

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Strange Interlude. . .

—From EF—

I had a strange, almost holy experience this last Friday. On Thursday, I got up at 5 a.m. to take Conrad to the SF-bound bus. He was attending a four-day writers’ conference, and I’d be on my own until Sunday. I came home, grabbed a little more sleep, and launched into my day. Belatedly, I’d realized that my driver’s license would expire that very day, so I needed plenty of time to stand in lines at the DMV. I also hoped, on the same trip, to retrieve my resuscitated G4 “dome” computer from MacAdvantage in Rohnert Park. Both errands worked out fine, to my great relief. At my age, the vision test isn’t a piece of cake, but no problem. I got home, made a simple but indulgent dinner, and went out to see Buried Child at Main Stage West. Fine actors, fine production, and so good to see old theatre friends. Home, ruffled the cats in the otherwise empty house, and fell into bed, content.

At 3 a.m. I woke to realize that I had to hit the bathroom fast—problem being which end to deal with first. I had somehow gotten a stomach bug. I was mostly in the bathroom till dawn, then staggered downstairs to feed the cats and collapse on the sofa the rest of the day in my woolly bathrobe and down vest, curled under two blankets. Damn, I was cold. Eventually I got smart and carried an extra pillow into the bathroom with me so I could curl over it in my lap while my rebellious gut did its thing.

So all day Friday I was alone with our cats in a silent house, no one to take care of me—but then no one I had to take care of. I slept on that couch from dawn to dusk, the same one where Conrad would take refuge when his post-surgical discomfort made him flee the bed. Something wonderfully accepting about that big soft couch, which we trash-picked from the corner of 18th & Dolores Streets years ago.

The cats tuned in, lay next to me, and helped keep me warm. I spent the day in my cocoon, thinking about nothing, worrying about nothing, doing nothing but staying asleep to heal. I have never before felt so released and focused. By nightfall the spasms had passed, I ate a little rice with milk and cinnamon, and wondered if I could sleep again. Yes, I could, all night.

I didn’t turn into a butterfly, but I had a great empathy with the evolving caterpillar, losing battle with its imaginal cells, dissolving into a nutrient soup that would feed its next life-form. Friday wasn’t such a bad day.

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Obsession . . .

—From CB—

I think I do obsession pretty well. Not that I would recommend it over Vitamin C, but it can be helpful to keep you on track. At times it can squeeze the life out of life, but if carefully nurtured I can be convinced, however rational I pretend to  be, that life has actual meaning— its function being to nurture my obsessions.

The earliest I can recall was a get-rich scheme when I was about four years old. I lived with my mom in a two-room shack—outdoor privy, outdoor pump, coal stove but mostly heated by the rats—and I was pretty conscious that money, what with the cost of child care while she worked, was a rare commodity. I was an economics prodigy. I knew about dollars. We didn’t have any.

But Mama got me a box of sparklers for the Fourth of July, and I ran around enjoying my little minutes of sparks, waving them, tracing the air with loops of afterglow. You wound up with eight inches of sintered wire, maybe a dozen strands.

Thus proceeded my first attempt at art (unless you count coloring Jesus purple in a Sunday School coloring book): I would make jewelry. My mom had a couple of rings and bracelets, so I could copy them, twisting rings and bracelets from the leftover wire, sell them, and we’d be brimming with cash. Even then I knew cash was God.

In retrospect, it was truly creative thinking. I applied myself with vigor and wound up with a vintage collection—rings, bracelets and other squiggly wires you’d have to find someplace to stick, maybe lay on the windowsill—to be sold for a nickel each. My mom must have made me a sales sign, as I hadn’t learned to write.

Granted, I had done very little market research, and there wasn’t much high-end retail in our ratty little slum of a ratty Iowa town. But I sat on the sidewalk most of an afternoon with my designer collection. Cars went by, and maybe a couple of kids, I don’t remember, but they would have said, “What’s that?” and I’d have replied, “Stuff.” I hadn’t learned to fine-tune my message.

Nothing got sold, of course. It launched no entrepreneurial career. But I see now—yike, I haven’t thought of this for decades—that it may have been my first small spurt of obsession. I had an objective. I had a plan. I had a dozen wires. I discovered a hidden talent. Though it flopped.

Why didn’t that utter fiasco end it there? Instead, it went on through collecting stamps, collecting bugs, collecting Cub Scout and Boy Scout badges, finding the madness of theatre, the maelstrom of Elizabeth, the jump from secure academia to the weird zigzag journey of forty-seven years as itinerant artists of squiggly wirework.

And now, in my mid-70s, weaving those little artifacts of sintered wire, calling them novels, hoping someone might walk past and think, hey, what genius, it’s worth a nickel—though I still haven’t really done my market research.

But it keeps me sane and heaven-blest.

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Check out our newest obsession, GALAHAD’S FOOL.

Solo . . .

—From EF—

Creating a solo show is a unique process. I’ve done two before Survival, and each was very different. The first was huge, a staging of Pamela White Hadas’ book of character poems, Beside Herself: Pocahontas to Patty Hearst, involving eleven separate portraits of women both historical and fictional. That was first produced in Lancaster PA, 1990/91, and I can’t clearly remember what the length was, but I think it was about two hours. Lotta lines to memorize, and eleven different characters to embody—a marathon. My best compliment was that two audience members got into a hot quarrel over post-show drinks, one claiming that there had been several performers, the other insisting that there was only one.

The second solo outing was Dream House in 2006/7, after we’d moved to Sebastopol. It was seven characters, maybe 80 minutes, and unlike Beside Herself it was our own writing. I let my alternate personalities out of the bag, using my incompetent clown self Bozo as the ringmaster. That felt scary as hell at first, but then it got to be honey and wine. I miss it.

Now I have another Bozo, the inner child clown self within a tough, wry small-town woman named Lou, who has been invited to do a talk on survival. The seven sisters of Dream House were all very familiar to me, since they were me, and all I had to do was focus on one at a time. Lou and Bozo are more distant cousins, so to speak, and I am just now beginning to fit them comfortably into my own skin.

And that’s a strange process. I’ve never before been so aware of how characters mature and ripen in rehearsal and performance, how they become like old comfortable clothes that can almost be felt by the body, warm and welcome. We expect to do Survival for a long time, and I look forward to surviving.

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Darlings . . .

—From CB—

It’s a truism among writing instructors: Kill your darlings. Meaning the phrase or passage you love so much that you’ll go to any length to preserve it, even though it stands like a speed-bump that rips off the wheels of your story. Not that Shakespeare should have excised “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Just that, unless it serves a vital function besides advertising what a genius the author is, you’d maybe better cut to the chase.

I can’t kill my darlings, but I can put them in cryonics. For every project going back to the Stone Age, I’ve kept a file of get-rid-ofs: things I like too much to cast to the worms but that just don’t fit. A few actually contain a seed that may sprout into something new, but that’s rare. Mainly, they feed the illusion that you are indeed a great writer but the world just isn’t ready for the utter irrelevancy of this passage.

At times, with our playwriting, we’ve had what we call the Flying Dutchman speech: a ghost ship that never comes into port. It’s an exquisite passage that it’s torture to cut, but it has to be. And then it finds its place in your next play—until the third rehearsal. And on and on.

These things do have a function besides exercising your typing skills. At times their presence reveals what’s really needed instead. At times, you can find a crisper way of saying it. At times, it stands as a simple monument to over-blow. But in any case, I do find that providing a homeless shelter for these frail souls does provide a way of getting them off the street.

Here are a few excisions from our forthcoming Galahad’s Fool. Roughly one page out of thirty-six.

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He saw a glimmer of his long-ago pet mouse. It had escaped from its cage, and the cat left its tail on the porch as a gift. He buried the tail, making a tiny cross of popsicle sticks, though he hated Sunday School.

If vampires couldn’t see themselves in mirrors, how could they put in their contact lenses? Simple: being bats, they squeaked. Bela Lugosi emitting tiny squeaks? That was always left out of the movies.

You’re on a freeway, you want to change lanes, you signal but the car in that lane won’t let you in. You try to push faster, they go faster, faster, faster, and then . . . you give up. Amazing: they slow down and let you right in. It almost never fails. Flip on your back, your feet in the air, say “You win!” and suddenly, “Okay, cool, go ahead.” The tactic is giving up. Losing, willfully.

Galahad would encounter Merlin at a crossroads, always a crossroads, in the guise of a game-show host. Merlin would quote the poet, tell him that he, Galahad, knows the whereabouts of the Grail if only he’ll reveal it, so he should put himself to torture. Three days of water-boarding, but he won’t crack. Want us to break your fingers, the soldiers ask, or cut off your nuts? At that point Galahad decides that the poet was just a poet, wrong from the start.

One more day done, gone, with its little mouse journeys and leftover email blurbs. Today his characters had pretty much behaved themselves, just a few outcroppings like the last gopher mounds of summer. Maybe tomorrow they’d crawl to the back of the fridge behind the spaghetti and fall into hibernation. Anything to delay the onset of the Quest.  

Then he saw—ye gods, he’d left the cage door open in his head—he saw his grandfather talking on his fingers, that half-formed mumble in a language never heard.

Grandpa Frank had grown up in Ohio, the son of deaf parents, so as a child he’d learned signing. He came west to work at a school for the deaf, met another teacher Lizzie, married and settled into farming. When Albert was very young, after his father split, he and his mom had lived a while on the farm, and he would watch Grandpa Frank sitting by the window in the worn armchair that smelled of old age, mumbling on his fingers. His lips moved silently, and his fingers would half-form the words. What were the words? What was the world where those words found a current of wind? Albert longed to know, but never asked. Now he was doing the same. Same search for words, and the same frustration as when Grandpa Frank cursed the old black Angus bull and whacked him on the flank to get him through the gate or railed at the crows descending to scatter the chickens away from Grandma’s slops. Something the old man had tried to tell Grandma, but when the words came she was already standing rigid at the ironing board. At last he spoke only in voiceless hieroglyphs.

The lost boy had heard voices he couldn’t understand, lines that sounded meaningful but couldn’t be deciphered. Exactly our political discourse, Albert thought. He recalled an email he’d sent once: If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it may very possibly be a duck—or it might just be a walrus with a good speech writer.

The few times I tried to speak in my own true voice she’d thought it was bronchitis.

With every bad idea a seed is planted.

The endocrine system is like comedy: it’s all in the timing. The substances exuded from the adrenals, pituitary, pancreas, thyroid, this wild chemical balancing act, like juggling balls that change size and shape as you juggle. Cells that send out federal regulators, which must achieve perfect balance or your industries collapse and there is no recovery from this recession.

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There are thirty-five more pages of these deletions, not counting the ones that just went up in smoke—so many darlings, so little time. Some are interesting. The book itself, it’s better.

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Comrades . . .

—From EF—

One perk of being 77 is reveling in long-term comradeship. I have been with Conrad for fifty-seven years, a mighty span. Right now I am visiting a friend I have loved for fifty-one years, another astonishing accomplishment. It’s been half a century of time and geography expanding and contracting like a celestial accordion, and there have been gaps, but we’ve never entirely lost the thread of that friendship.

While CB had his first post-doctoral job teaching at the University of South Carolina, 1966-68, we staged our own adaptation of Euripides’ Hecuba, and an amazing actor, Flora Coker, played the title role (I played her daughter). Even at that age, she was a force of nature, and is still the best actor I know. We were young enough to be good friends of that extraordinary bunch, and when we left and moved to Milwaukee, we tried to stay in touch.

Our first trip to Europe was in 1969, and we were already involved with the extracurricular theatre group that was to become Theatre X. We found Flora in Ireland and asked her to come join us in Milwaukee, and after a few months she did. You can look up Theatre X in Wikipedia and be amazed at how good it was and how long it lasted. 

In 1974 Conrad and I separated from Theatre X and started The Independent Eye, but after the aches and pains of parting had dissipated, we all worked together from time to time. Our own theatrical work was literally all over the map in the US, and Theatre X did regular residencies at The Mickey in Amsterdam. Visits were rare treats, and working together was special. 

In the early 80’s we wrote Full Hookup, which was superbly staged at the Actors Theatre of Louisville with Anne Pitoniak in the central role. Later Conrad directed it with Theatre X with Flora, and in my mind, hers was the defining performance.

In the 90’s, when we were in Philadelphia, we wrote and staged a four-character comedy Loveplay, based on improvisations with the same actors who eventually played the roles. We imported Flora from Milwaukee, and she lived with us during the script development and again for the spans of performance. She and I played a pair of long-term lovers in a dispute over polyamory. It was wildly successful. 

Then we moved to Sebastopol, and visits only happened when our touring took us to the Midwest, but they happened. And when money permitted, we’d sometimes manage plane fare. Right now I’m enjoying three days of catching up and loving it, and it’s worth every bit of the aggravation United Airlines is happy to provide. Hail Time, hail Friendship, hail Flora.

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Old . . .

—From CB—

I became aware of the Whorfian hypothesis—that a language structure profoundly influences the way we think—in an undergrad linguistics course in 1961. I was 20 then. It’s entered the popular consciousness in simplified form: language structure, grammar, vocabulary reflect and influence its societal nature. More Inuit words for the varieties of snowfall, all that, or the subject/verb structure as the enabler of Western imperialism. Not that this has many practical applications: you use the tools you’re given for what you’re given to do.

But saying anything about language is like painting a picture of the sea. Try to capture a perpetually changing face, it can’t be done. And how do we corral a concept that has no verb, like Peace. Doing peace? Waging peace? Imposing peace? Fomenting peace? Just lying there, not even being a Who? A classic poster, Help Stamp Out Violence, brings up the same dilemma.

What brings this to mind, though, is a simpler issue of vocabulary. I was in process of composing a query letter to agents for our new novel CHEMO, just completed. Whole books are written on how to write a query letter—a literary genre in itself—so as if writing a haiku or a greeting-card verse, you strain your head to squeeze out every word. And so I flipped to the thesaurus to find a single adjective that suggested “acerbic” and “old.”

But it held that same danger as crossing the street in London—you look the wrong way, you get slammed by an omnibus. Perhaps if I weren’t 76 I wouldn’t have noticed, but as it was, the first entries in the thesaurus slammed me full fifty yards and wrapped me around a lamppost.

The synonyms for “old.” Positive: venerable, experienced, seasoned, mature. Neutral & non-judgmental: elderly, aged, antique. senior, hoary (perhaps), olden.

Then, down to brass tacks:

Decrepit, gray, tired, fossil, broken down, debilitated, enfeebled, exhausted, geriatric, getting on, impaired, inactive, infirm, oldish, not young, over the hill, past one’s prime, senile, superannuated, wasted, antiquated, archaic, obsolete, old-fashioned, passe, primeval, primitive, primordial, timeworn, antediluvian, dated, fusty, moldy, obsolescent, old hat, old-fangled, old-fashioned, out-of-date, outmoded, outworn, bedraggled, creaky, crippled, dilapidated, doddering, feeble, fragile, frail, haggard, incapacitated, quavering, ramshackle, rickety, seedy, shabby, tottering, tumble-down, decayed, faded, fallen-in, impaired, run-down, used-up, worn-out, long-in-the-tooth, declining, no spring chicken. . . I could go on. Though I do kinda like “unimproved.”

Perhaps worse are the adjectives that indicate youthful cuteness: spry, zippy, feisty. I would infinitely prefer to be haggard than to be feisty.

These linguistic riches are grounded in many things. The sense that at a certain age you’re no longer of use, a drag on the economy. The Sixties expansion of a “youth culture” and desire to break with the past. The belief that “innovation,” the god of the 21st century, comes only from 20-somethings. Revolt from our fathers and mothers. The concept of “greedy geezers.” The godhood of competition, where old people seem to be standing in the way of those who really deserve their jobs. The decline of listening as an art form. Much else.

I feel this personally, of course. Not to the same degree, as long as I have Elizabeth in our mutual admiration society. But if you haven’t become “a name” in your profession by the age of 76, you may be respected, you may even be an inspiration to various others, but no one really wants to work with you. Agents for your fiction can’t expect to be nurturing a money-making client for the next forty years. You slide slowly into invisibility.

It’s a waste. The same waste that’s afflicted us with sexism over hundreds of years. As we have slowly accepted the multifarious gifts of women, we have garnered gifts. There have been myriads of women who, I would venture to say, have been perfectly content with their lot to make cheese and infants and woven fabric. Likewise, countless men who want nothing more than to retire with a cup of coffee and golf on weekends. We should respect these people for their struggle simply to exist. But there are also those who have something more to give after the age of 65. Or to say it more assertively: something more to give than they had at age 64.

We must question the thesaurus.

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