Most of us know that Clint Eastwood has a place in Carmel called Mission Ranch. When he won the Oscar for “Million Dollar Baby,” he even gave the folks there (which included me from time to time) an honorable mention.
I like going there because, instead of feeling like I could babysit most of the kids in the bar, I am one of the youngest people there. Mission Ranch is definitely for the more mature crowd, but it is not for the faint of heart.
My friends and I have to plan this event in advance. We put on our pumps and get ready to line up our chairs for the show. They drink tea, but I typically order my Manhattan (which I’ll definitely need as my possible future flashes before me in this has-to-be-dimly-lit lounge).
One of my friends won’t sit at the piano bar. In fact, she won’t sit at any bar. It has to be a table. Maybe she doesn’t want people to know why she is really there (anxiously eyeing the door while waiting for Clooney). I don’t care. A seat is a seat to me. The closer the better for seeing, but the further away for some of the shrieks that come from the open mike and sometimes the piano player. The place is packed with once-successful singers, has-beens, and wannabes.
One older man has a pretty good voice, but he sings the same song every time I have ever been there (“They Call the Wind Mariah”). It’s the time I excuse myself and ride like the wind for the bathroom or, if I smoked and would consider starting if this guy kept singing, a very long ciggie break). Typically, this starts the show.
Ok, so I am not always the youngest one in the place. Enter the gold-diggers in their baby-doll tops and their mules (shoes to start with). They carefully scope out the sights, strategically eyeing the salty-haired (and most likely traveling and married) golfers leaning against the bar. The giggles and leans begin and we watch the cleavage, the connections, and the switches. Hopefully they will leave with a mule of their own, at least for the night.
With a ringside seat, we watch a cougar slither in. She sidles up to a seventy-something gentleman at the piano bar and soon she is leading him to the dance floor as they laugh and begin fondling one another. Obviously they know each other? Probably not. And the dancing (or whatever you want to call it) begins.
The cougar’s bling-laden paws are sliding up and down the backside of her hopeful and suspecting prey. He looks like he likes it because he is now grabbing her rear end enthusiastically. We are ready to gag, but we can’t stop watching. It’s like driving past a bad accident and you just can’t help but look. It’s an unexpected, X-rated show.
The music stops, but they don’t. But don’t blink. The cougar now moves on to another toupeed-Tommy and starts the process again. It’s “That 70’s Show” for real. It’s a mate-and-switch. It’s swinging seniors. And it scares me.
If I stay single for the next twenty years, is this my inevitable future? Will I be hanging out at Mission Ranch (will Clint still be alive?), will I be wearing all the rings I own, and will I be grinding on a not-so-sexy centenarian? And are those kids in the other bars looking at me the same way that I am looking at these ranch hands? Just shoot me now.
A high-pitched squeal from the mike shocks me out of my future tripping. This is one time that I would rather hear anyone calling the wind Mariah than thinking that I might end up this way.
I snap out of it and pull my gaze away. The gold-digger at the bar has definitely hooked one.
Then in walks a botox-lipped, very busty blonde in a low-cut, overflowing halter top. Every male head (yes, both heads on each guy in the place) turns her way. The testosterone level goes up and even the Viagra-enabled are standing at attention.
She can’t move her mouth very much, but she manages to whisper a few words into the ear of a guy who has quickly established his position in her path. She leans in as he flushes an adolescent shade of pink. She smiles (or tries to) and he moves closer.
And within a matter of minutes, she breaks his heart, shatters his fantasy, and leaves him in her wake as she moves on to the next. In the meantime, I’m wondering if I should dye my hair and try myself out as a blonde (I think I have a halter top like that).
Something tells me that Clint is somewhere in the background directing these vignettes. But I don’t want to stay to see the ending of “They Call the Blonde Mariah.”
Copyright 2009 Robyn Justo
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Robyn Justo is a freelance writer who is living, breathing, and learning the new rules of dating over 40. Experienced, but by no means an expert, she shares the frustrations, triumphs, and general hysteria of single life on the Monterey Peninsula. “The Expiration Date” addresses the lighter side of dating later in life. The names have been changed to protect the innocent (and the guilty). Robyn also occasionally hosts local social events for those brave-hearted single folks who actually have the courage to come out of the house.

This New Year’s holiday, why don’t you do yourself a favor and skip those resolutions that you intend to fulfill, and try to carry out for three weeks, only to abandon. Instead, make non-resolutions that you have no intention of keeping from the start.
In other words, operate like Congress. Over-promise and don’t deliver.
It’s easy. What’s more, you don’t have to suffer regret that you failed to carry out your promise. Instead, you cynically made a pledge that you knew to be a falsehood. You achieved that. A lasting achievement.
Lying to yourself can be pleasurable.
Most resolutions have to do with boring crap anyway, like losing weight. It’s always about personal bad habits and usually about losing weight. For the past ten years you have made the pledge to lose weight, and for exactly thirty-six-and-a half days each new year you make feeble, aggravating efforts to carry it out. Then, you plunk back on the sofa and resume gorging on chocolate Ding Dongs.
If you never made that weight loss gig stick, what makes you think you will now? We both know you’re weak just like everybody else. Unable to see anything through to completion.
Instead, make that lack of resolve count in your favor. The trick is this. Instead of making a resolution that requires some kind of dramatic achievement (i.e., take twenty pounds off and keep it off), do that which not only reinforces something you find pleasurably wrong, but is also something that can be achieved easily for the very reason that it is one of your naughty delights.
Anything that’s bad for you or is temptingly wrong… you’re likely to be good at.
Okay. Here’s an example. I pledge to engage in perverse behavior only sixty-five percent of the time over the next two months instead of seventy-three percent of the time… over only the next two months. Or, I pledge that, instead of frequenting the fifty-five bars that I now frequent, I promise to narrow that down to thirteen bars as my favorites.
Get the picture? These are doable. You can make these. You haven’t given up your wicked pleasures, only reconfigured them. This is how our government operates. They take a statistic like twelve percent unemployment and say instead, “We’ve built employment to almost one hundred percent.”
Portray weakness as strength. It’s called spin.
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I’m not big on New Years’ Eve as a general rule. Historically, in the past, fat middle-aged people in suits and ties who looked like they were about ready to suffer heart attacks from their profligate high-consumptive ways and high-stress jobs went out to noisy parties where they wore stupid paper hats and made noise with crankable noisemakers, little cheap gizmos made in Japan. In other words, they acted like half-wits to whom the next year would only bring more financial and personal disasters that anyone moron enough to act this way fully deserves.
In the background, a Guy Lombardo song, the only hit this joker ever had, sickly warbled as a tribute to the mass of hopeless, sodden boozers.
Today’s celebrants are younger and hipper. They have small parties of maybe seven friends over for cheese and sips of French wine… while watching on television a bunch of cold people in Times Square watching a giant ball descend a building. You’re watching a group of people three thousand miles away who have worse weather than you do, and who are themselves watching something… a giant ball on a building.
Boy! This is gonna be memorable.
Anyway, after this pseudo fabricated ritual, with your blood-alcohol level at 2.3, you get behind the wheel of a car. What fun!
Since you did the exact same thing last year, this next year should be really special and different. All the signs are there.
I’ll tell you what I do. I tell myself, it’s no different than yesterday… and just go to bed. In the middle of the night I hear far-off noisemakers somewhere and car horns and roll over and go back to sleep.
I get the best of the deal.