BZZZT's for a Hollywood Lion

And Aging: Part I

            Is Biden too old to be re-elected? Is Trump going to live forever?

            Do I really want to live long enough, myself, to find out?

            Yes. To the third question. And I'll tell you one reason why.

            Thirty years ago, I interviewed a man who had been a lion wrangler and stunt double for Lindsay Wagner in The Bionic Woman. He was forty-six at the time, and I was fifty-one. Currently he holds a Life Endowed Chair in Health Aging Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and is Scientific Director of the American Federation for Aging Research.

            "A tough age for me was twenty-five," Steven Austad told me in 1993. He had graduated (English major) from UCLA. "I wasn't doing anything I wanted to do." He did relish driving a cab in New York, at times,"like when a cop jumped in with pistol drawn and said 'Follow that car' -- a madman had just thrown a firebomb at the Iraqi consulate.