by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service Pop Culture Writer
It’s * Oldsters Night * at Augie’s Long March, and the thirtysomething hipsters crowded into the exclusive dance club are having the time of their lives. Their hunched over, arthritic, hard of hearing and just about blind lives.
“My back is killing me!” shouts millionaire stock broke, broker, broken Aidan Aquiline.
“What?” responds Marilyn Ferbisher, heir to the Ferbisher hot wax and cold comfort treatment fortune.
“Back! Killing me!”
“Attack bling tree?”
“Back! My back!”
“No, I’m not black! It’s just the lighting in here!”
Thanks to their diminished eyesight, Aidan and Marilyn won’t realize that they aren’t the people they came to the club with – and think they’re talking to – until they’re in his hotel room with half of their clothes off. At that point, other imperatives will kick in.
* Oldsters Night * isn’t actually for old people – to get in, you have to be wearing a Crash and Burns suit. The suit simulates what it’s like to be old: weights sewn into the sleeves and pants legs distort the wearers’ balance and quickly causes their muscles to ache (the way everybody shuffles around it, the dance floor looks like an audition for a George Romero film); adjustable straps keep wearers hunched over (making them look like they’re auditioning for the lead in an adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel); goggles block their peripheral vision and blur their sight, and earplugs make hearing difficult (like ghosts stranded between this world and the next – are you getting the sense that aging is not for the faint of heart yet?). The Crash and Burns suit was named after an actor who lived to be 100 and, for reasons nobody has ever been able to articulate, a cartoon bandicoot.
“Whoever named the suit was obviously thinking like a 100 year-old!” chuckled Augie’s Long March owner Aldo Squiddlucci.
The suit was originally created by a car company to help them design interiors for…drivers of a certain age. It was adopted by hospitals to sensitize medical staff to the needs of elderly patients. Then, young well-to-do people heard about the apparel and apparently said to themselves, “Getting old sounds like fun – I must try that!”
There is no question that * Oldsters Night * at Augie’s Long March is wildly popular: the line outside the club went down the street, around the corner, kitty corner across the next intersection, through a laundromat populated by twentysomethings hoping to get lucky and middle-aged men who loudly tsked disapproval of everything going on around them (and half of what wasn’t for good measure), halfway down an alley, up a fire escape for three floors, through the apartment of a very nice Filipino woman and her pet alpaca, down the hallway and up the stairs to the roof, which was getting uncomfortably crowded…
“Why won’t you let me in?” complained Fred Pagliacci from the front of the line as he watched a couple in matching orange Crash and Burns suits get waved through. His three piece, conspicuously not orange suit was impeccable (it generated a small force field which made it impervious to the attention of birds).
“You’re not dressed for the occasion,” the bouncer informed him.
The question is, why would anybody want to experience being old in a social setting? “What?” asked Internet puntrepreneur Toby Fustybottom.
“Obviously,” Squiddlucci jumped in, “they’re wearing the suits ironically.”
Ironically?
“Obviously.”
It wasn’t obvious to me, but it was…readily apparent that Squiddlucci wasn’t going to say anything more on the subject, so I asked him if people who wear Crash and Burns suits are making fun of old people?
“No, no, no,” Squiddlucci protested. “We love old people. As long as we don’t have to interact with them. Or, look at them. Or, frankly, have them anywhere near us. Hmm…when I think about it, that doesn’t sound like love at all, does it? It sounds more like teenagerhood. Fair enough. But that’s not what’s happening here.”
Squiddlucci explained that wearing the suits was a safe way for young people to sensitize themselves to what their lives will probably be like when they’re old without having to sit around waiting for 50 or 60 years. “Has anybody ever accused somebody on a roller coaster of making fun of real, hard-working ghouls? Not that I’ve never heard!”
Still, why make a social event out of this experience?
Squiddlucci scoffed: “You don’t seriously expect socialites to stay home on Saturday night, do you?”