Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between) (2016)

A Note from Your Friend Old Lady Jackson

Old Lady Jackson is a character I made up when I started catching myself giving advice—initially to Mae and Miles on the Parenthood set—that sounded like it came from your gray-haired grandma who spends her days in a rocking chair knitting you scratchy socks you pretend to love at Christmas. By creating this character, who was obviously very, very, very far away from myself, I hoped to confuse Mae and Miles, among others, into thinking that while I might sometimes seem to offer suggestions that could be considered a tad “old-timey,” they weren’t actually coming from me; they were really coming from this weird, remote other persona, and I was actually still very hip and relevant and wore my L. L. Bean duck boots ironically, and of course I knew who Tegan and Sara were (but only because Miles made me a CD).

When I started feeling older than my co-stars and other younger friends—some of whom were in their teens and early twenties—it was not in the normal ways I would’ve expected, like getting up from a chair and exclaiming “Oy, my hip!” For me, it started when my mention of Happy Days was met with a blank stare, and I couldn’t convince anyone that the AOL pager had ever been a “thing.” Because I live in Hollywood and am contractually bound never to age, instead of shouting “Your generation doesn’t understand anything!” and stalking off to use the landline to call my answering service, I’d just roll my eyes and say, “I don’t mean to sound like Old Lady Jackson here, but do you really want to post that picture of yourself in your underwear on Instagram?” As if to say, Of course it’s fine with me if you do that, because personal boundaries are so late 1990s, but someone way less cool, who doesn’t use Postmates to get their groceries delivered, might think it’s just a wee bit of an overshare.

Old Lady Jackson isn’t judgmental; she’s just worried about you, and wonders about things like your nose ring (doesn’t that hurt? And how can you possibly keep it clean?) and that sixth tattoo you got (isn’t five enough?). But not me—no sirree, I’m proud of you for expressing yourself!

One morning in the Gilmore Girls makeup trailer (during the first series) I was prattling on to Alexis about the possibility of getting a tattoo and the exciting potential of designing it myself, because, I explained, that’s where the real fun was, the real artistry. I could just picture my new tattooed life: I’d be out at some cool club or bar (assuming that along with my new tattoo I had also started going to cool clubs and bars for the first time ever), and some hot dude in a biker jacket would catch my eye and appreciatively check me out, and what better conversation opener, what more sure path to lifelong happiness and true bliss, than “Cool tat. Did you design that yourself?”

After I went on and on about my fantasy post-tattoo life for a while, Alexis smiled and gently said, “So, what would you get? A shamrock?”

Um, no. I mean, what? NO. A sham—? Please, that’s just SILLY! Why would you think I’d get something as predictable as a sham—OH DEAR HOW EMBARRASSING YOU’RE RIGHT. I’M A CLICHÉ OF A SOMEWHAT IRISH PERSON. But hey, it’s not like I was going to put it on my ankle, so at least there’s—OH FINE OKAY YES THAT’S EXACTLY WHERE I WAS GOING TO PUT IT.

After my embarrassment faded, I realized I didn’t want a tattoo anymore. Why? Because through her (more mature) eyes I suddenly saw the inherent futility of it. All at once, it was like I’d done it already, experienced a brief thrill, lived with it for a couple of years, and eventually woke up one day and felt like, huh, what a weird thing that was for me to do.

Sometimes the idea of doing something is the most fun part, and after you go through with it, you feel deflated because you realize you’re back to looking for the next thrill. Often, waiting reveals the truth about something, and not responding to your every impulse can save you the heartache of waking up in the morning with a sense of regret after having impulsively texted that guy at 2:00 a.m. because you just had to tell him about the funny skit you just watched on SNL, and it’s not like you want to date him or anything, and you’d only had one glass of wine, or was it two? But in any case he was probably up anyway! Don’t press send, Old Lady Jackson is fond of counseling. Just wait a beat.

Talking about getting a tattoo was, I realized, a perfect case of life being about the journey and not the destination. And I felt relieved to have saved myself from reaching my destination with a lot of tattoos on my upper butt area that I’d then changed my mind about.

One of the best things about Old Lady Jackson is that when you don’t take her advice (Miles and Mae have approximately seven thousand piercings between them, and exactly 152 tattoos each), it’s fine with me! She’s no fun, but I still am!

Old Lady Jackson is concerned about you in other ways too, but I think you’re doing great! OLJ is (obviously overly) worried about things like that dating app that wants you to have your location services on all the time (how is that possibly safe?) and the fact that all you ate yesterday were liquids that came in mason jars from that juice place on the corner (really? No solid foods at all?). OLJ doesn’t love it when that guy texts you at eleven o’clock on a Friday night after you haven’t heard from him all week and wants you to “hang out,” and you do. She’s worried that you aren’t being treated as well as you deserve, and while she understands that “things are different now,” surely there have to still be people out there with better manners and an ability to make plans with you at least a day or two ahead of time?

Old Lady Jackson is also very worried about the alarming number of young people she’s heard are being prescribed Adderall so that they can “focus better at school or work.” In OLJ’s day, they called the feeling of not wanting to sit in the library for hours the “feeling of not wanting to sit in the library for hours.” And it wasn’t considered a medical condition to be bored or distracted at work; it was just part of the reality of work.

A while ago I saw a young family in the airport, a couple with their young toddler, who was happily sitting in her carrying chair thing. All three were looking down, scrolling through their phones with glassy eyes, not speaking to one another. We see this a lot, of course, but this was the first time it really occurred to me how different things are now than when I grew up. I didn’t have a mobile phone until I was in my late twenties. My fourteen-year-old godson just got one not too long ago. But the next generation, like this baby in the airport, will never know what life is like without a device. This raises a couple of questions: What does the future hold for this baby? And can she already beat me at Candy Crush?

We can all agree that airports are the worst, and a tough place to entertain a fussing baby. And presumably the parents were doing something important and would return their attention to each other and their baby in a moment. Probably the baby was sitting there learning to speak Mandarin or monitoring her stock portfolio. Even so, there’s a checked-out, drugged sort of look we get when on our phones that’s different from the look we get when reading a book, or even just staring into space. I get that look too, and when I catch my own reflection, it gives me a chill. It’s like Gollum’s face just before he drops his Precious in the water.

The people I know who use social media and dating apps do so because they’re trying to connect, stay in touch, and in some cases find someone to go out with or maybe even to fall in love and start a family with. In fact, this family in the airport was quite possibly formed by these advances in technology, and now, thanks to the wondrous connectivity to which we all have access, they had finally achieved their dream of finding each other—but they were still sitting in the airport scrolling through their phones. And this is just the beginning. Where will we go from here?

When my sister meets her work friends for dinner—a group of super-high-level New York business types—they sometimes do the following: everyone places their cellphone in the center of the dinner table, and the first one who can’t take it anymore and goes to reach for their phone has to pay the bill. Fun! When I’m driving somewhere, I’ve started to put my purse in the trunk of the car to prevent myself from checking my phone at a stoplight. I think games like this are necessary until we figure out how else to resist the temptation to click on important breaking news stories while driving, like “Ten Cats with Surprisingly Human Faces!”

Or rather, I think it’s all probably fine! Let’s make a date to see each other and then spend twenty minutes scrolling through hundreds of photos looking for that one we just can’t find! Let’s not wonder about one single solitary thing when we can just Google it over appetizers! Let’s leave our phones out on the table “in case of emergency,” but respond to all the non-emergency texts anyway! It’s just what people do! I’m totally okay with it! It’s that crazy Old Lady Jackson who thinks it’s weird, and she wrote you a letter on actual paper to give you her thoughts:

My Dearies:

I miss car keys. Those unattractive fob blobs they use now don’t hang well on my key chain, and my gentleman friend is always forgetting to give them to the valet. What, you think Old Lady Jackson doesn’t have the occasional suitor to escort her to a nice sushi dinner once in a while?

Please, please, sit down. No, not there, dear, that’s for company. Have a cookie, you’re too thin. Is it cold in here? What was that? Speak up, dear. I won’t keep you long, I know you’re busy. Let me tell you a story. One day, that horrible Marion from next door “invited” me to one of those group online thingies where we keep track of our steps and see who has the most—you know those? You do. Of course you do. Well, for a few weeks, I participated, and I thought it was the most wonderful thing. Such a sense of accomplishment at day’s end! So I started counting absolutely everything, and got all these wonderful apps: I counted not just how many steps I took, but also how many hours I slept, how many calories I ate, how many followers I had on Facebook, what the weather was like in Hawaii, how my retirement stocks were doing. I got a countdown app to remind me how many days I had left to shop for my nephew’s birthday. I got an app to track the constellations in the sky, an app to record how much money I spend at Starbucks, an app to remind me to water my plants, another that reminds me when to order more contact lenses, and one that tells me how many times I’ve listened to Doris Day sing “Que Sera Sera” this week. Isn’t progress wonderful? I got an app to read what everyone thinks of restaurants too. This one was confusing to me, because it seems every single restaurant in the country is just horrible. But anyway, I especially loved the steps app because I could look at the thingie marker, and if Marion was getting ahead of me, it would make me jump out of my chair and wave my arms around to get my count higher. I beat her so many days that I could almost forget all the times she hid my trash bins and stole my Sunday paper. Bliss.

Then my gentleman friend and I were home one night drinking prune juice with vodka and binge-watching The Waltons, and apparently I was getting up to check my phone more times than you can say “Good night, Jim-Bob.” Finally my gentleman friend paused the VHS tape right on John-Boy’s face and asked me what it was that was distracting me. And I told him it wasn’t at all that I was distracted; I was just excited by all the wonderful new information that was coming in, and did he want to see the weather in Hawaii or join our step club too? No, he said, he didn’t. And then he asked me a question. “Why?” he said. What was I going to do with all this information? Why keep track of so many things? And why did I keep marching around the living room waving my arms over my head? What did it all mean at the end of a day, or the end of a life, for that matter? (When you’re our age you think about these things, dear, but don’t worry yourself about it just now—you’re still younger than you think.)

Anyway, everything suddenly went topsy-turvy and I had to sit back down on the davenport. Have another cookie while they’re warm, won’t you? My story is almost over. I had to sit down, because I suddenly realized what a waste of time it all was. I take my walk every morning rain or shine—who cares if Marion goes a little farther? I water my plants when the soil looks dry, and I haven’t forgotten my nephew’s birthday once ever. In fact, I started to think about my nephew and all the time he uses that phone, always checking for likes on that Instacart. It’s good to be bored in the car, I always tell him. Spend some time with just yourself and your thoughts and nothing to do. How else will you learn who you are?

I’m worried about your posture, dear. I’m concerned that it comes from all the looking down. What with your phone and the Xbox and the taxi TV and that music player you wear on your arm and the headphones that look like donuts on your ears, doesn’t it make life so much smaller? If absolutely everything important is only happening on such a small screen, isn’t that a shame? Especially when the world is so overwhelmingly large and surprising? Are you missing too much? You can’t imagine it now, but you’ll look like me one day, even though you’ll feel just the same as you do now. You’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and think how quickly it’s all gone, and I wonder if all the time you used watching those families whose lives are filmed for the television, and making those cartoons of yourselves with panting dog tongues, and chasing after that terrible Pokémon fellow…well, will it feel like time well spent? “Here lies Ms. Jackson, she took more steps than the other old biddies on her road”—is that the best I can leave behind? Is it all just designed to keep us looking down, or to give us the illusion that we have some sort of control over our chaotic lives?

Will you do me a small favor, dears, and look up? Especially you New Yorkers and Londoners and other city dwellers who cross all those busy streets. How else will you take in the majesty of the buildings that have stood there for hundreds of years? How else will you run into an acquaintance on the street who might turn into a friend or a lover or even just recommend a good restaurant that no one has complained about on that app yet? If you never look out the window of the subway car, how will you see the boats gliding by on the East River, or have an idea that only you could have? Just look up for no reason, just for a moment here and there, or maybe for an entire day once in a while. Let the likes go unchecked and the quality of sleep go unnoticed. Que sera sera, my dears—whatever will be will be, whether we’re tracking it on our GPS devices or not.

Look up! Look up! What you see might surprise you.

Love,

Old Lady Jackson