Older

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• May 17, 2015

When I was a young girl, I wanted to be older.  Most kids want to be older, but only by a couple years.  I wanted to be an adult.  Adults seemed so smart to me back then.  My parents, aunts, and uncles will attest, I was an extremely mature child, making me odd, but pleasant.  I would sit at the table with the adults, listening to their adult conversation, sometimes interjecting unlikely wisdom from a small kid.  On the elementary school playground, I wasn’t good at making friends.  I often paced around, making up stories and acting them out to myself.  Sometimes, I would sit with the aids who had to chaperone recess.  I always thought they seemed sad, and I would chat with them.  Looking back, I realize that I was a fucking weirdo.  But because I aimed to make adult’s lives easier, my strangeness was welcomed, and I was much beloved by all my teachers.

I’m the middle child of three kids.  I have an older sister, Lisa, and a younger brother, Mitch.  We are all two years apart.  Lisa and Mitch weren’t bad kids at all.  Actually, I think they were really good kids.  But they were, in fact, children, and so they often acted like children.  In case you haven’t spent a lot of time with kids, they can be super fun, because they have great imaginations, and the world hasn’t disappointed them yet, but they can also be super annoying, selfish, and act like total assholes.  Sometimes, my siblings acted like the children they were, and my parents would yell, and get upset.  I never wanted to upset my parents.  They were (are) my favorite people.  And I’d watch Lisa and Mitch when they acted immature, and how it made my parents lose their temper.  I chose not to do that.  I chose not to be childish.  I seldom got in trouble as a kid, because I never wanted to let my parents down.  I never wanted them to be mad at me.  I never wanted to be childish.

Every birthday, people would say the same thing about me, “Lori’s 8, going on 40.”  “Lori’s 12, going on 40.”  Every goddamn year.  I, in turn, took this as a compliment.  Indeed, I viewed myself as above my young peers.  I felt children were a burden on adults.  I didn’t want to be a burden.  I wanted to be older, and independent.  This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy being a kid.  I would have done way better in school if I didn’t spend so much time looking out the window daydreaming.  I spent my afternoons with my siblings or best friends climbing trees and riding bikes, I loved Disney movies and board games.  But you have to understand something about my childhood, my parents, and many aunts and uncles are really fun adults.  They had just as much fun as we did at Disney World, my cousins birthday parties, and long summer days.  They were (are) big kids themselves.  I looked up to them.  These adults, they had the best of both worlds.  They were older, but younger than anyone I knew.

My elementary school years were spent wanting to be an adult.  Skip high school, college, even my 20’s, I wanted to be an adult who’d figured it all out.  But by the time I was in middle school, that changed.  Being older still had it’s appeal, but in my old young age, I started to learn things I hadn’t noticed before.  A lot of adults had this razor sadness in their eyes, a disingenuous tone in their voice, and an invisible force that dictated their lives, a force I would later recognize as fear.  I studied adults.  And no one noticed, because I was just this quiet, well mannered kid, but I was studying and internalizing, and making hypothesis on human behavior.  I knew nothing of psychology then, but I was psychoanalyzing everyone in my own way.  I saw the world as a beautiful place, full of adventures.  The world sparkled to me, from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed.  A lot of kids see the world this way.  But the more I got to know adults, the more I saw they didn’t see this sparkle.  It worried me.  I was worried the sparkle would disappear for me too, or worse, that it was never there.  That it was just some dumb thing naive kids thought existed.  I hated being accused of being naive.

In middle school, I still enjoyed the company of adults, but I stopped wanting to be one so bad.  Just the opposite, I didn’t want to grow up at all.  I wanted Peter Pan to tap on my window, and never age another day.  I wanted endless summer vacations.  I wanted to boycott becoming an adult.

In high school, I wanted to be in college.  In college, I wanted to drop out and pursue comedy.  Upon entering show-business, getting older has a whole new meaning.  I was told to lie about my age from the start.  I was young, but I look even younger than I am.  Lie about your age, you’ll go farther that way.  It makes sense the industry wants young, especially with comics.  There are no really great comics in their 20’s.  There just aren’t.  Why?  Because it takes years and years to become great in comedy, and that’s why all the greats are older, because they’ve been doing it a long time.  If you’re a great comic in your 30’s, that’s pretty amazing.

I think comics are the most special people on the planet.  They are all fucking crazy, but they are genuine people.  Besides being a life long fan and obsessed with comedy from a young age, when I first entered the comedy community at the young age of 20, I was stoked to find a subculture of adults who haven’t conformed to be lying sacks of shits that most adults become.  I was immediately drawn to comics and how honest they were, regardless of how ugly that truth can be.  I felt I could belong in this subculture.  I felt as though, I’d been searching for it my whole life.

You’re encouraged to be YOU in comedy.  Find YOUR voice on stage.  It takes years to become comfortable on stage.  It takes years to do this.  It really is amazing.  But then, the industry wants you to be a certain way.  Be sexier.  More energy.  Be more like this person.  Be younger.  Your age is one of the most basic things about you.  If I’m going to lie about how many times I’ve ridden the Earth around the sun, I’ve already undone everything I’ve worked for.

There’s nothing worse to me than someone who won’t tell you their age.  Their shame screams something about their doubt, and wasted time.  I don’t want to be older and wish I was younger.  I want to be older and smile because I was younger.  And maybe I was an idiot sometimes, and maybe I made wrong decisions, but I want to have a great story, and I want to be me.  I think growing up in today’s society is conducive to hiding who you really are.  Hiding the fucked up thoughts in your head.  Hiding what you really want to say.  Pretending to be a certain way.  Hiding your age.

I was right about a lot of things when I was a kid.  I often think I was wiser then.  I recognized a darkness in me that only grew with age.  The world disappointed me.  Adults disappointed me.  I knew I would struggle with this, and so, I sent messages to my future self.  I collected items to help me remember how I saw the world.  I wrote myself notes.  The world still sparkles, it’s just harder to see sometimes.