Off Their Rockers

Old people are awesome.

I've been saying it for years-- I love old people. I think they're adorable, and they get to have a lot of fun I couldn't get away with, because no one's going to say anything about it to a little old lady. And Betty White's new show, Off Their Rockers, is a celebration of that fact.

When I was young, my mom had this poem hanging in our downstairs bathroom:

WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN I SHALL WEAR PURPLE
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

I always liked that. It's the basis for the Red Hat Society, if you've ever seen any of the groups of Red Hat Ladies out and about. I don't like them quite as much as the poem-- I don't think they really get into the spirit of it. But Betty White? Yeah, she gets it. She just turned 90 years old and she poses in pictures with young men in speedos. And now she has this show, where a bunch of old people do crazy stuff and prank young people.

The first thing that happens in the show is a great example. An old man stops a young woman in a mall, and asks if she can take his picture. She agrees, and he tells her that he wants a running shot, so he's going to go around the corner and get some momentum. He disappears, and when he comes running back around... he's naked. He's smiling ear to ear and she actually does take his picture before he is tackled by security, at which point the girl is giggling to herself, not sure what she ought to be doing but extremely amused.

The whole show is like that. Most everything they do gets the same reaction-- a slow-dawning realization of "what the hell just happened?" followed by giggles. A little old man asks for help sending a text message to a lady friend. A young woman agrees. He asks her to send "You bring the wine, I'll bring the whips and handcuffs! Tonight's the night!" and when he leaves, she gets on her phone and tells her friend about the most incredible thing that just happened to her. An old man hobbles up with a cane, pulls a skateboard out of his bag, and proceeds to show up the little teens messing around in the area. Then he puts it away and hobbles off. I'm surprised no one got their phones out to take pictures, but all the spectators were grinning from ear to ear, unsure what they just saw, but delighted by it all the same.

It reminds me of Improv Everywhere, which you should look up if you've not heard of them. They're absolutely delightful. They do things like choreographed musical numbers in mall food courts, with everyone from the janitor to a girl working behind the counter in on it. Sometimes they'll even get spectators involved, like the time a guy got everyone on the subway to help him propose to his girlfriend. It leaves people delighted, because it's fun, and because it's totally unexpected.

So it is with the little old man coming into the grocery store and bowling with produce, or the guy whose motorized wheelchair tried to run away, or the little old ladies dressed as nuns who invite people to a party with a wet t-shirt contest, or, really, most everything that I have seen on Betty White's show. It's delightful. And it's on hulu-- go watch it!

You earned it.

So I've been watching Celebrity Apprentice this season, because there were a lot of cool people that were on it-- George Takei, Paul from American Chopper, Lisa Lampanelli, and, of course, Penn Jillette. It's been a really interesting show to watch. Mostly I've hated every person on the women's side except Lisa, and have been annoyed at their cattiness, and mostly I've loved the men, and been pleased at their professionalism. Of course, more of them men have real careers-- many of the women were singers I've never heard of or on TV shows like Real Housewives. I would expect the people who actually work for a living to be a bit more successful in a business-oriented show.

Anyway, last night, they fired Penn. I am annoyed by this, and not only becaue I like the guy and think he was one of the best (if not THE best) contestants.

The task was to create an in-store display for the Macy's flagship store to launch Mr. Trump's new cologne, Success. They had a certain amount of space to work with and about a day to do this, and one of the things they had to do was to come up with a slogan. Slogans are, of course, part of the alchemy that is successful marketing; it's hard to measure exactly what they do, but a good one will help sell more stuff. It should be short, simple, and memorable. And it should ideally both say something positive about the product and invoke positive feelings in the consumer. Marketing, like everything in the nebulous "science" of economics, is a sort of voodoo, and very hard to quantify. So the judging of which slogan (and which display in general) really depended on how the Macy's executives felt about it. However, I think that their feeling about this one was wrong; I think they made the wrong choice, and that if they make decisions like this all the time, it's no wonder they are not a store I prefer to shop at.

One team used a quote from Donald Trump, always a good call, sucking up to the boss-- except that he was not the one making the decision, but whatever. They went with "Always Trust Your Instincts." ... I don't see how that is a particularly good slogan. If I am out at Macy's around Christmas timee, looking for a gift for a man, and I see/remember a display that says "Always Trust Your Instincts", I am more likely to take that as advice, and go get the first thing I thought of, rather than the cologne in question. (I doubt that the majority of people who will be buying the cologne from Macy's are men; men who buy their own cologne shop in better stores.) Also, their display looked like a set piece from a school play-- obviously made by hand.

The team Penn was on put together a much better display, with a beautiful backlit photo and just a lot more professionalism all around. It was the kind of display that I would stop and look at, if I were shopping. And their slogan, I thought, was better: "You earned it." That says to me 'be proud of your success, treat yourself to something nice, buy this cologne.' And I think it is a much better slogan if you are buying a gift-- I got you this nice cologne, because hey, you earned it.

The Macy's executives hated it. They thought it was pompous, and not at all what their clients were looking for. And that tells me that Macy's will always be a low end department store, and will never attract the kind of clientele that spend more money.

Perhaps it is a little "pompous." But to succeed, you have to have a bit of an ego. If you are buying a cologne that has the Trump name on it and is called "Success," you're probably a little pompous yourself. You feel like you DO deserve it. Also? Huge cosmetics company L'Oreal uses the slogan "Because you're worth it." It's been pretty damned successful for them.

So Trump fired Penn, because he came up with the slogan the executives hated-- after admitting that he himself actually like it. And I get that decision, even if I don't like it. But the Macy's executives... all I have to say to them is "You're wrong, and you're stupid for thinking that."