REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
 

Aging: A laughing matter

03:23 PM CDT on Friday, August 22, 2003

By MICHAEL PRECKER / The Dallas Morning News

The first time Laura Ainsworth ran into age discrimination was when, all of 6 years old, she auditioned to sing a jingle about a carpet-cleaning company.

"They decided I sounded too old," she says. "So they got my 4-year-old sister."

And what year was that?

Nice try, buddy.

It's not that Ms. Ainsworth is unhappy about the number of years she's graced the planet. It's just that if we proceed in the usual newspaper style (Ms. Ainsworth, 22 ... or Ms. Ainsworth, 55 ... or Ms. Ainsworth, 103 ... ), all you age- obsessed readers will make assumptions that may not be fair.

"Why is that the most important thing?" she says. "It's always 'name, comma, age.' We think we have to know how old everyone is, so we think we know all about them."

But Ms. Ainsworth, whose résumé ranges from singer to actress to corporate trainer to comedy writer, isn't content to disdain your age obsession. She wants to change it.

"I think someone needs to be taking on this issue in a humorous way," she says.  "I have a mission."

The curtain rises on that mission Thursday night at the Ruby Room, a Greenville Avenue nightclub. Ms. Ainsworth has put together a cabaret act of patter and song, jokes and irony, to make her point.

"I have so much I want to talk about," she says. "I find new material in the news almost every day."

This was going to be in a book, sparked by, of all things, American Idol.

"I was watching it and it occurred to me you could be any race, ethnicity, height or weight. You could even have a criminal record – but you couldn't be over 24.

"And that was OK with everybody because age is the last culturally acceptable bias."

That doesn't sound terribly funny. Then Ms. Ainsworth's vocal coach assigned her My Ship, an old song by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin that begins, "My ship has sails."

A longtime lover of song parodies, she immediately warped the classic into My ship has sailed and I've missed the boat/Can't play the ingénue/Or else tongues will wag/"What a sad old hag/If she only knew..."

And the stage was set, you might say, for a show named My Ship Has Sailed: How to be a Late Bloomer in a World Obsessed With Youth.

With accompanist Brian Piper, Ms. Ainsworth has worked up more than an hour of material taking swings at everything from Botox parties to lying about your age on résumés to why it's OK for men, and only men, to grow old ungracefully.

Everything from Puccini to Madonna to Gilbert and Sullivan lends itself to revised lyrics. We don't want to give too much away, but snap your fingers and sing along to the theme from The Addams Family:

"It's runny and it's oozy,
It's purple-ish and bruisy,
You're throwing up and woozy,
It's plastic surgery."

Some material didn't need to be satirized. In the 1933 film Roman Scandals, Eddie Cantor – in blackface – sings a song to a group of comely, underage white maidens, who are being attended to by black chorus girls dressed as maids.

Mr. Cantor's message: Keep your beauty if you want to be loved/Take care of all these charms and you'll always be in someone's arms ...

"It's horribly dated, of course, and terribly politically incorrect," Ms. Ainsworth says. "But the one thing that still holds true is the song."

If all goes well, My Ship Has Sailed will become a weekly staple at the Ruby Room, then graduate to a bigger venue, then be booked at corporate events, then dazzle them on Oprah, then take the nation by storm, fixing our misconceptions all along the way.

"I want to be a cultural phenomenon," Ms. Ainsworth says forthrightly.

In case you're a little skeptical, remember that My Big Fat Greek Wedding started as a one-woman show. And she wasn't that young a woman.

Then again, Ms. Ainsworth's musical crusade may open and close this week, a lost needle in the haystack of pop culture and advertising, celebrity worship and makeovers, and all the people behind them who conspire to make us believe the world belongs to teenyboppers – or those who still manage to look that way.

If that happens, she can always keep her night job, which is staying up till the wee hours with her husband, Pat Reeder, to write jokes for morning radio DJs around the country.

In another story for another day, the comedy couple live in a beautifully restored 1913 house in Old East Dallas with a dozen exotic birds, many of whom sing along while Ms. Ainsworth rehearses. They've been mirthfully married 13 years.

And how old was she when they shared their first joke?

Nice try, buddy.

"I don't want to be put in any category," she says. "I don't think other people have the right attitude. If they did, then I wouldn't care. I just envision a world where age is incidental."

Good luck. You should live so long.

E-mail mprecker@dallasnews.com