Welcome to Musing Interruptus. Thank you for clicking, thank you for listening. My greatest aspiration as a child was to be cool, fully knowing it wouldn’t mean anything if I called myself cool. I had to earn it. I would have to get someone to say it. Kinda like a Beatlegeusse, Beatlegeusse… Beatlegeusse …. thing.

I knew that cool people looked and acted a certain way. At 7, The New Kids on the Block, the Fonz from Happy Days, and Amelia Earhart;  at 9, my cousin the musician, at 39 Lilly Tomlin and Simone de Beauvoir… and Bono.  From 7 to 9, they all had a few traits in common, they were aloof and calm, assured, attractive, had leather jackets. They looked like rockstars. The real kind, not glam rock. The New Kids On the Block had their own collectible cards.

A few years later, I struggled to identify coolness in ...